Life-Coaching for Pirates

The accepted Rules for Living in my old neighborhood varied from what you usually encounter in “organized society.” Here are the key examples: “Steal Big!” “Do Unto Others Before They Get the Chance to Do Unto You,” and the immortal “If You Cannot Dazzle Them With Brilliance, Baffle Them With BS!”

Following these rules to the letter, one’s child will “grow up” to be a corporate raider, a gangsta, or a buccaneer.

I lived in one of the two catchment areas for Flushing High School, a pair of Mitchell-Lama co-ops called Mitchell Gardens and Linden Hill. I met people like my classmates for years. In grad school, people who never attended class approached me asking me to write their term papers. People like those I grew up around would buttonhole tedious people who hit the books and ask them to cheat. Of course, they would offer them money to do so, although in my case the money didn’t matter.

I remember that, in school, my teachers made feeble attempts to pass ethics along. One class debate centered around the following question: “Do the Means Justify the Ends?” (I recall that the class did not come to an agreement.) My childhood neighborhood was composed of strivers whose goal was economic supremacy. You were expected to snag the money, and it did not especially matter how you did so. It seems to me that American society is tending toward this viewpoint.

How did my neighborhood get like this? One theory involves family origins: the plurality of my neighbors came here as refugees, escaping oppression and a general lack of opportunity in their home countries. It is no wonder that, per the advice of the baseball great Satchel Paige, “Don’t Look Behind You; Somethin’ Might Be Gainin’ on You!”

This viewpoint requires the individual to view others as less than human. Social exchanges are purely transactional. Do you have the advantage or do you not? Life becomes a game in which the only goal is triumph. Take no prisoners, ever.

I stubbornly plod along, muttering my own little truisms: “Do Unto Others as Thou Wouldst Have Them Do Unto You” and “Increase the Peace.” I am tedious.—Kathryn Nocerino