Tinley Park:

Racism, Ignorance,
Lovelessness and "Madness"
-Anthony Rayson

[After distributing our first issue of Sandpaper in December, we received a zine in the mail from a man living in Monee, Illinois, named Anthony Rayson. Thought Bombs is chock full of honest assessment of social and political realities, rude invective, letters from luminaries in the race traitor and abolitionist scene, and illustrations done by 11-year-old Stanton Rayson. Anthony says in his opening to the publication that he's "a long time union steward at work and I play a little tennis and golf. It's your basic brain dead idyll. However, I also happen to be an Anarchist, an Abolitionist and an Atheist." We thought we'd give an excerpt from one of his writings, because some of us had no idea that such people existed in the suburbs. You can write to Anthony at 27009 S. Egyptian Trail, Monee, Illinois 60449.]

 

Tinley used to be a small, old town, populated by the progeny of mostly German immigrants. Aside from the local bourgeoisie, the houses were modest dwellings. The yards were glorified postage stamps. These places were lived in to death by the explosion of children in the late forties, fifties and early sixties. Baby BOOM! indeed.

I arrived in this suffocating, yet surreal environment, in the middle of this birthing phenomenon, 1953. Politically, most of the adults were reflective reactionaries, absorbing societal lessons with superficial obsequiousness. A small percentage of the townspeople were liberal. Rounding out thepicture were the usual minute number of natural outsiders- the crackpots, nutcases, criminals, thrill seekers, deviants, losers and "mad" men. A large mental institution was its main claim to fame.

With a dim bulb of comprehension, the translation of social values (schizophrenic to begin with) lost all ties to sanity, when these parents attempted to force feed this drivel into their numerous children. The results were children, given minimal nurturing and attention, basically on their own, with the basest racist and sexist mindlessness to fortify them for the future.

But it wasn't just a racist, sexist "education." Ignorance of any useful information of enlightening ideas was passed on, either through gross misinformation or the fearful withholding of facts. The "facts of life" were avoided like the plague for fear the children would be uncontrollably promiscuous. The wedge forced between the sexes bred fear, frustration, alienation and self-loathing, among those uneasy with the structure of reality. Who couldn't be uneasy? What was the point of having the sexes psychologically separated and any deviation from the WASP ideal pitilessly ridicule?

Racism was a constant. The town was lilywhite, so the objects of such venom were rarely visited, towns away. Blacks were considered like dangerous lepers, to be avoided and hated. Not a few lads were fixated on Hitler and the swastika, short-circuiting their brains with intellectually crippling anti-ideas.

I was six when the sixties began, nine when we were almost vaporized into radioactive dust (Cuban Missile Ego Crisis) and ten when Kennedy's chickens came home to roost. When the Chicago Blue Shirts went on their savage, nightly rampage during the convention [Democratic National Convention, 1968, held in Chicago], I was almost fifteen. Your basic idyllic childhood....

Juxtaposed against a daily dose of slaughter from Vietnam, there were inklings of mental freedom. The hippies seemed happy "living on love." Music became meaningful. College students were demonstrating and occupying buildings. Blacks had militant, young leadership and their ghettos went up in flames with bloody regularity. These militants were systematically gunned down by the police apparatus and fellow-travelling reactionaries. I was sixteen when Fred Hampton's free breakfast program for ghetto children and adult education were utterly traumatized by his murder by police ambush. Fred was one of the very few great men of this country.

The young whites in Tinley started to wobble out of their lower class orbits. Their parents turned on them. The teachers never did like 'em, and the cops went on the offensive. The young would collect at rendezvous points- safe houses, parks, but mostly in the woods. When the cops invaded our party spots in the woods, we could usually scatter from our bonfire without capture. Someone might even toss bullets into the fire for their arrival. We hated the pigs. Sometimes, we'd see our friends, beaten to a bloody pulp, spill out of a car. "What happened to you?" "Fuckin' cops" Other times, we'd see our friends for the first time in a long while- in court! Everyone ended up in court with some kind of bogus charge....


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