Assholes in the town in which I grew up, harass a reporter covering them.

[NNadir]

I definitely know the type, motorhead greasers with poor educations and big stupid mouths. While I knew many fine people when I was growing up, there was a fair share of these types.

Commack, Long Island:

News reporters become subjects of ire at anti-lockdown protests

Oh well, not that they are bright enough to know it, Darwin will win with this selection pressure.

[bbernardini]

1. Have any of them been identified yet? nt

[NNadir]

2. Well, they'll probably show up on rolls of hospital admissions in a few weeks.

Possibly they'll show up in the Obituary section of Newsday as well.

I couldn't care less who they are.

[NanceGreggs]

3. Never knew you were a fellow Islander!

I grew up in Bayshore.

[NNadir]

4. I left a very long time ago, but I still have some family there.

I head out there for funerals and weddings; a cousin has a party for my large extended family every summer in Nissequogue.

It seems a lot more developed than when I was growing up, but there are still a few nice areas, I guess.

But one encounters Long Islanders all over. There is a diaspora of us.

I left Long Island for California, where I lived for quite some time in the Beach Cities of LA, working to lose my father's Brooklyn accent, and then to San Diego. Finally I moved to my personal nirvana, New Jersey. It's funny how much I love New Jersey, because when I was growing up on Long Island, we all regarded New Jersey as a kind of ugly grease pit. If we heard someone was from New Jersey, we felt sorry for them.

One of my cousins died recently, and I went out to Long Island for his wake, and it all seemed so surreal, driving down Northern State passing well, Commack. I briefly thought of stopping to drive past my old house but decided against it.

There was always an ugly side of Commack; in the lower middle class in which I grew up in that area, decades ago, a lot of racism, for one thing. It's painful to remember. It wouldn't have surprised me to see some of the people I knew as a kid marching for more Covid-19 wearing MAGA hats.

But I also knew and loved many fine people out there as well. I could never live there again though. When I went out into the broader world I felt like a provincial, and I was one, in fact.

[whistler162]

10. Three words The Good Steer

Most if not all the potato farms are gone now. My mother and uncle worked hard to lose their Brooklyn accent since they spent summers in western PA before and during WWII. I am from CNY but my mom's brother and his family lived in Smithtown.

[NanceGreggs]

11. I left the Island in '74 ...

… when I moved to Toronto. For years, I flew or drove down to visit family and friends every two months or so. But by the late 80s, my trips became infrequent as relatives and old friends left the Island and scattered across the country.

My first husband and I lived in San Remo, just where the Nissequogue River runs into Long Island Sound. Beautiful spot – our house was right on the beach.

My last trip to the Island was in the mid-90s – haven’t been back since. I have used Google Earth to explore my old neighbourhood and favourite haunts. Can’t believe how built-up everything is now. When I left Bayshore, it was still full of wooded areas between subdivisions – now there isn’t a lot without a house on it. The house I grew up in barely recognizable – as happened with most of those tiny, post-war homes that have been added-to, expanded. The two-bedroom house I was raised in now has five bedrooms!

It was a great place to grow up, though – gorgeous beaches on both the north and south shores, driving out to the Hamptons on a summer night to check out the bars and the bands.

Despite being away for decades now, I still have my Brooklyn accent. Although it’s not as strong as it once was, I still hear “Oh, you’re from New York!” when I meet someone new.

And yes, I remember the disdain for NJ growing up: “Whadda yuh expect? That idiot is from Joisey! He don’t know from nuthin’.”

[NNadir]

12. Ah, San Remo...

I lived for a time in Fort Salonga, just before I got married. It was a pretty nice area; I used to take bicycle trips down Sunken Meadow Road.

I did move back to Long Island for a short interlude, for a break from California, in the early 80's. It was a good thing too, because I met my wife when I lived there.

She was from Staten Island, and we split from Long Island and got married in Lake Tahoe; I became a California boy and she a California girl.

When I got a great job offer in New Jersey, she agreed to go, but as we were leaving California, she cried because she couldn't believe she was moving to New Jersey. (At night the refineries up in Elizabeth would crank up, and sometimes you'd smell the diesel fuel in Staten Island, mixed, of course, with the odors of the garbage dump. Sometimes when I visited my in laws I was worried the sky would explode.)

Imagine that, she was from Staten Island and looked down on New Jersey!

Now, of course, she'd never go back to California. We live in the Princeton area, and - at least before Covid - there is I think, for all the places I've been in my life, there is no more wonderful place to live than this part of New Jersey.

I agree about growing up on Long Island. I also thought Long Island was a good place to grow up; but then I raised my sons in the Princeton area, and I can't imagine any place in which to grow up that could be better than this. The raw intellectual power my sons have dwarfs what I had when I was their age. Where they grew up has something to do with it. I don't know if Long Islanders still think that we New Jerseyans "don' know nuttin'..." but, well, maybe they're just provincials who "don' know nutting 'bout knowing sumptin."

Those people in the CNN videos in the OP certainly are not very well educated. They're fools, obviously. I know the type.

You by the way, write brilliantly - I'm a big fan - so obviously people can emerge from Long Island with excellent educations.

On reflection, my education on Long Island wasn't half bad. It could have been better, but it wasn't half bad.

When I first lived in California, people were always making fun of my accent, but then one day I heard Joseph Heller on the radio, like you, a brilliant writer, and his Brooklyn accent was much heavier than mine, and I ever afterwards felt OK about my accent although eventually I put it away. I still pull it out once in a while, just for fun.

Thanks for the memories...

[DEbluedude]

5. Not all of us motorhead greasers...

are like that.

[NNadir]

6. I know. One of my best friends growing up was a motor head greaser.

He was, in fact, one of the most talented people I knew. He was a fine person as well.

He should have been a mechanical engineer; he would have made a excellent one. He knew how everything worked. However, after a very messy marriage, he got heavily into drugs and kind of fell apart.

Not everyone I knew in Commack was like those people in the video, but there were, in fact, a lot who were.

[Sneederbunk]

7. Where's the pepper spray when I need it?

[I_UndergroundPanther]

8. Why do they look almost like each other?

Mostly the men are in late 30's to 60, white ,redfaced, beer gut, sweaty,beards,chubby,dirty looking like they haven't showered in a few days and always some degree of sunburn?

The women are either large or small nothing in between. large women have Karen haircuts,they are pale. The small women look like they have bodies ravaged by drugs.

I dunno what it is that makes them so like each other.

[Celerity]

9. 'small women look like they have bodies ravaged by drugs'

well, motorheads are speed/meth junkies, so there you go

from the OP






Lemmy was a speed junkie, it is why he called his band Motörhead

[roamer65]

13. I wonder if these covidiots would be pulling this protest crap if it were the MERS virus.