By Paul Nachman
12/15/2014
Anonymous Attorney’s recent VDARE.com blog entry, Notes From The Underground: Big City Subways Can Be Scary Territory For Whites, naturally brings to mind a January, 1997 article in American Renaissance: one man’s account of working as a conductor in New York City’s subways for four years, aptly titled Hell On Wheels.
It’s written by a young immigrant from Hungary who worked on the trains to support himself while attending City University of New York. His article is a recital of, primarily, black-on-white thuggery — but not entirely, as the mixed examples in this two-paragraph excerpt show:
[D]uring the break-in period [i.e. on-the-job training], I saw a horrible incident in the East New York section of Brooklyn. A horde of black teenagers descended upon a black boy who was sitting quietly by himself. Within seconds, they beat him from head to toe, then quickly fled before the doors closed. We tried to talk to the boy, who was in bad shape, asking him if he wanted medical help or the police. When he said he didn’t want either, we asked about the attack. It turned out he was on his way to the first day on a job. The gang beat him up because they didn’t want him to work.After the break-in period, I was qualified as a conductor and began to operate without supervision. It didn’t take long for our instructor’s prediction to come true. I was conducting a D train in the Bronx when I noticed a large group of black men gathered on the platform, just outside the conductor’s window. I felt their threatening presence instinctively, but the rules require that the conductor lean out the window and look down the platform in both directions before he closes the doors. I had no choice but to open my window and take the risk. As soon as I opened it, one of the men spat right into my eyes. I was wearing safety goggles but still got some of the saliva on my skin — regulations require that goggles be worn primarily to protect against passenger assaults.
Besides the brutality that he had to deal with, he noted, "My job offered me the opportunity to see parts of New York whites seldom see. The United States may be the only country that has never been attacked, but still has places that look as though they went through a war."
I myself grew up in 1950s and 1960s Chicago and routinely rode the "L" trains (which are mostly elevated — hence "L" — but run underground on some of the routes, as they pass through downtown) solo, at ages as young 10 and sometimes just for fun. Now I'd be leery of riding most of those trains on most of their routes at most times, reflecting an enormous loss — among many others with the same underlying cause — for the civilization of that city. (The only likely path back to civilizational sanity was described in April, 2008 by the late Lawrence Auster in his blog entry VFR’s Solution To The Race Problem In America.)
By 1995, the subway-educated Hungarian had seen enough to determine his own solution. He concluded:
It is hard to believe, but I worked for two more years in the subway before I finally turned my back on that hellish job, in the summer of 1995. I now live in a privately policed community in Manhattan. I ride the subways only if an emergency requires it.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.