How Soon They Forget

In this story in today's Commercial Appeal, they report on the downtown phenomenon of "flexing." Basically, hundreds of youngsters cruise along Riverside Drive in their cars, trying to see and be seen, stopping to chat up friends and impress the opposite sex. But the City is enacting a "no cruising" law to put a stop to that.

The sole reason given is that the many cars are clotting up traffic around Beale Street and the Pyramid, and choking Riverside Drive. Nevermind that they are public streets and parks, that the City has never addressed the area's parking needs adequately, that no crime is being reported in connection with flexing. It's taking money from downtown and Beale merchants and that's good enough.

Black kids cruising and meeting girls is a problem. But when white kids did it not-so-many decades ago, it was "American Graffitti." Or kids today can do it in the parking lots along Winchester and Summer Avenues, where police can "manage" the problem better and that's tolerable.

But left out of the story is another, possible, motivator for this new law. Take a drive along Riverside. To one side, you have Ol' Man River himself, rolling along oblivious. But to the other, you have the bluffs and the many expensive homes overlooking Riverside. Some very wealthy, powerful and important folks live up there and one can just imagine the noise drifting up to their aerie paradise. No doubt the gods on Olympus look down upon the masses in their sordid affairs and despair of the pollution encircling their little bit of Manhattan on the Mississippi.

Or not.

Until next time, that is all.