Posted on 04/23/2006 8:52:59 AM PDT by TexKat
Thanks Darby.
right click on this screen and select view source... find one my posts and you will see all you need to know....
Signing off for tonight. Thanks for the stimulating discussion.
Clever of you to make a snippy little retort without repeating your arrogant comment that in your time at Duke you were wise enough to be "very cautious about getting mixed up with the locals."
Did you major in snot-nosed condecension?
Did you ever think that maybe there wouldn't be quite so many strippers in Durham if there weren't Duke students hiring them?
Or maybe you were afraid of getting caught in the bigoted maw of Southern justice, the victim of a BillyBob prosecutor like Durham DA Michael Nifong, both of whose parents are Duke graduates.
Lots of adolescents have a riduculously inflated sense of themselves, an attitude that often finds expression in contempt for "the locals." Fortunately, most people leave those grandiose feelings behind when they mature.
That Durham...what a dump! You can't even drink beer all day long and then hire a couple of strippers and bait them with racial insults without risking getting your butt in a crack.
I am very proud that you honored my hometown with a few years of your presence. I am sure that Durham is better for the experience.
Durham is your home town? And, currently?
"Durham DA Michael Nifong, both of whose parents are Duke graduates."
Really? I must admit to having wondered if Nifong wasn't admitted to Duke; hence, a wee bit of "get-even"?
Duh! Yes, you are correct re: the percentage... that's why my student's in Pratt and I'm not! :)
I did my calculation before I saw yours. I didn't mean to seem to be correcting you.
I'm an army brat and "grew up" in Fayetteville and Raleigh among others. I went to Duke on partial scholarship, work study, and loans. I loved the triangle and would have loved to have found a permanent home there like my brother. My parents relocated to the area because they liked it so much. I have no desire to insult Durham. There was a definite element that tried to take advantage of Duke students because they were Duke students. There seems to be a belied throughout that all the students are wealthy and that is far, far from the truth. I don't understand the resentment of everyone of these kids. I certainly never insulted, by my behavior, the surrounding community and if others did, it had nothing to do with their going to Duke or being "priviledged" or "elite". It would have had to do with their being poor citizens anywhere they went and that happens with any large group of people. Nifong is grouping every student together--who cares who she identifies as long as it's from pics of Dukies? This reverse stereotyping makes the lives of every white male college boy a dangerous endeavor.
I've been trying to explain to anyone who would listen that this crime could not have occurred because the accused are northerners and everyone knows that only southerners are bigots. : )
I get lots of dirty looks.
I live nearby, in Raleigh, and am delighted to be out of Durham, which I do not especially care for, not because of Duke, but because there are too many gang-banging drug dealers and out-of-control black teenagers. Most of the hardcore rednecks don't infringe much in the areas of the city that I ever frequented.
I remember as a child that there was the feeling that Duke undergraduates were brats. Nowadays, it seems to me that the undergraduate college is hardly noticed by the community, except in basketball season. For most people in Durham, I think that "Duke" means an institutional behemoth, mostly medical, that employees 30,000 people.
I am a little surprised to see myself so furiously offended at a slight against Durham. Of course, Durham has some major social pathology in its large black population. Ironically, Durham wouldn't be such a poorly governed town with ridiculous spectacles like the shop-lifting school board member if it were not for the very liberal Duke community reliably combining with the block-voting blacks to give Durham a city government that looks like a miniature Detroit.
In spite of all Durham's problems, I have consistently found in my adult life that people whom I have known from around the country who move to the Triangle area, are always trying to get me to go with them to Durham to see the famous Durham Bulls or otherwise hangout. People rag on it, but they think it is "hip." There are plenty, plenty of very sophisticated people in Durham.
But as to any Duke undergraduate brat swaggering around with a general feeling of disdain for the locals, such a person would be not only a brat but also a fool. If the arrogance of youth did not diminish with maturity, I'd say that we have evidence that even the finest education can not make a silk purse from a sows ear.
(I believe I have exhaustively answered your question as to whether Durham was my hometown. LOL)
My father was a merchant in Durham who did a noticeable fraction on his business with the Duke community. It was not exploitative although some customers felt, from time to time, that they werent getting a bargain, shall I say. I went to grammar school at E.K.Powe and Ninth Street was the "mall" of my young childhood. All the hip places there had previous lives as normal, neighborhood businesses. I am speaking of my memories back to the early 50s. My mom used to pick me up from school and we stopped a couple of times a weeks at the dry cleaners which is now the fashionable Regulator Bookshop. Ditto for shoe repair, pharmacy, etc.
I really do not know what you mean about the community exploiting Duke students. Some cab drivers charged too much? Some little store that was especially convenient to campus overcharged for a six-pack? The Ivy Room didn't put enough pastrami on its sandwiches? (That one tee'd me off.) People with old houses to rent near campus charged as much as they could get?
Your complaint sounds to me a little like the sociology of a freshman dorm room that sees the community as the pizza vendor and the convenience store operator near campus. These people truly would have been boobs if they did not charge whatever the market would bear. I am really not trying to be insulting (anymore), but I think that your feeling of the community trying to "take advantage" is very much the limited vision from your former young and naïve peer group, maybe a vision frozen in time as you have moved on to your adult life. I have noticed that people tried to rip me off in New York and in Paris. I wouldnt make too much of it.
I remember going to a Smothers Brothers show at Cameron as a high school student in the early 60s. They opened their act with the comment, Well, were glad to be here in Durham
..the armpit of the South. Of course, the place went wild. My friends and I went wild, too, not wanting to be less hip and disdainful than anyone else. I remember wondering later if they used that line in every college venue or if they had worked it up especially for Durham. I expect that it was a staple in one form or another. I am not proud of having joined in the derision. But I am not really ashamed, either. I was a know-all kid myself and entitled to my youthful season of exaggerated self-regard. A bit like Garrison Keillor, I found it amazing that such a magnificent person as myself could have been born in a dump like Durham. It is remarkable, though, how much some of those Durham people have learned as I have gotten old.
In an ideal world, the only ones left, will be right.
I'm a cultural southerner. Both of my parents were from the deep south but left as part of the World War II generation. My mother still has a very heavy southern accent. I highly resented the concept from some of my fellow Dukies and many others I've known since then that the South was somehow "less" than the rest of the U.S. I've always seen it as quite the opposite. When I applied to colleges and was accepted, I purposely chose Duke because it was not in New Haven, or Cambridge, or Princeton NJ but because it was in my beloved South. I was disappointed to realize that most of my classmates were from north of the mason-dixon line.
One guy I knew got mixed up with a girl who said she was pregnant and wanted a considerable amount of money to have an abortion. I guess they hadn't done a lot of talking because his religion and pocketbook kept him from pursueing the offer and he wanted the baby. She turned out to be mistaken or suddenly had a miscarriage or some such routine. Others told of somewhat similar occurances and the consensus was to stay away from sleeping with the local girls. Of course they shouldn't be sleeping around anyway, regardless of with whom they slept but their classmates didn't seem to have the same monetary goals.
I never felt taken economically except by the University. I worked in the kitchens with many from Durham and I was friends with them. My original comment solely concerned the topic at hand; getting "mixed up" with anyone who might perceive an economic advantage to yelling rape or pregnancy is a danger to a guy who is looked at as having money to spare. One's classmates were less likely to do that than a girl picked up at a local bar. Even in 1985 there were campus marches to "Take Back the Night" and speeches about all men being rapists. That idea has naturally evolved into these lacrosse players being condemned before ever having a chance to defend themselves by a few faculty and Brodhead's attitude.
Every GI who spent time in an overseas area that had a SOFA agreement (Status of Forces) with the host country knows exactly what you mean. The locals don't use preganncy so often, but most of these "SOFA" charges are settled directly from the wallet of the GI, who is usually being unfairly or falsely extorted......any old accusation will do--the GI is faced with the alternative of appearing as defendant in the local "court"......and lets face it.....the villages outside the dates of every American base worldwide are only there because the base is.....
Okay, you've won me over and I promise not to berate you with anymore hate posts!
It actually is quite interesting to hear your reflections on your time there. The pregnancy scam is something I haven't heard about or thought about in many years. I wouldn't be surprised if my dim recollection of hearing about such things was exactly from the context that you described.
I am sure that you are aware that Duke has become steadily more academically elite and more diverse over the last fifty years with fewer kids paying the full cost. Back in the 50s and early 60s it was by no means a heroic academic feat to get into Duke. The average SAT was somewhere in the 1100s. I think it was pretty well packed with New Jersey and Long Island kids more distinguished for their parents ability to pay than for their academic skills. As the profile of Duke undergraduates changed, local perception was probably pretty slow to catch up. The only thing that I can say in defense of local sluts using the honeypot ploy to try to get into daddy's pockets is that our enterprising Durham girls must not have been as dim-witted as was suspected! LOL
Thanks for not getting too offended to take up a little conversation here with me.
OT: John Kerry was a lacrosse player. http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2004/Aug/02/ln/ln09a.html He's number 23. Has a goofy smile.
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