Spanish Harlem – Society

There is many things to speak about when you look just at Spanish Harlem as there will always be something happening in it. There’s either a shooting or an assault or something even more. What I want to look at and speak about for everyone to look at is how the society just takes in all of this and accepts it as if it is some normal thing, which for those of us who live or lived there, it was. I was raised in Spanish Harlem for a decent amount of time yet even when I didn’t live there or moved I would still come by for both school purposes and to visit family or friends. While there you always know which area to not go to and who or what type of people would be there. An example would even be 125th street. You always get warned from family or friends to not go in those areas because there might be a crackhead there or a shooting. Yet do we really question it? No. Do the police generally care? Maybe but they don’t really try and take action until they get called to the scene. There are so many things that we go through as a society that we just casually accept. I remember when I was in middle school, this was at the time of the mass amount of masked clown killers, and I was walking with a group of my friends home as I was taking each of them home as per usual. Across the street from our middle school and across the adjacent street of my friends house there was a knife sticking in the grass by one of the apartment buildings and we each just looked at each other and contemplated if we should call the police or not. Then when I finally get home later I’m told by my mother that they arrested one of the masked clown guys on 105th and 3rd Avenue or something, which is only a few blocks away from my middle school. I wasn’t really disturbed by this fact and me and my friends even joked about it the next day in school about how it could’ve been us or something. The neighbourhood I lived in had shootings every night but they never really bothered me or anything as I grew to accept it. But why should I be so comfortable things like this and why should my friends or family? This isn’t something that should be normalized. I think as a Society we should care a little more and put more effort in so kids don’t grow up just accepting the fact that hey, you might get caught by a stray bullet. This isn’t something normal and is really only normal in New York.