Back in the summer of 1961, I, along with some other undergraduate students at Wheaton College, went to New York City to work with some of the street gangs. Specifically, the street gangs were in East Harlem, an area with one of the highest rates of juvenile crime in the country. I, along with another fellow, was assigned to work with the Turbans whose territory included the area around Lexington Avenue and 110th Street. Most of us were housed at the Biblical Seminary of New York in very, very spartan rooms and given $3.00 a day to pay for food. Needless-to-say, we did not earn any money to take back for fall semester. In fact, two of the other guys and I took jobs with the Burns Detective Agency to supplement our meager earnings. Most of our assignments involved crowd control at concerts held at the Forrest Hills Stadium out in Queens. Although I did “guard” the beer at Piels brewery in Brooklyn one Sunday night!
At Wheaton we had a chapel service every Monday through Friday morning and attendance was mandatory. One of the chapel speakers during the spring semester, was Jim Vaus, the founder of Youth Development, Inc. (YDI). He had a very compelling story based on his life of organized crime on the west coast. He worked directly for Mickey Cohen, the Al Capone of the west. Vaus, the son of a Methodist preacher, was a self-taught electronic genius for that time. His involvement with organized crime was to intercept the results of horse races by two minutes. During the two-minute interval other criminals would go to a bookie parlor and place bets. They were, indeed, making a killing. Vaus along with his wife, were on their way to the airport for a flight to St. Louis. He was going to set up the same devices in that city to intercept all races east of the Mississippi River. The haul for organized crime would have been staggering. They had time to kill, so she convinced him to stop at one of Billy Graham’s tent revival meetings. Well, to make an extremely long story a bit shorter, Vaus “walked the sawdust trail”, did not catch the plane, and the next day informed Cohen that he was quitting—something you do not do, voluntarily. He then began giving speeches in a variety of venues, including prisons. At a prison in Pennsylvania, an inmate came to him and said, “why come here, you need to help us before we get here”. This put Vaus on course to find the area in the country in the late 1950’s that had the highest rate of juvenile crime. That area was East Harlem in New York City. He left his family in Oregon, moved to the back of the first floor of a tenement building and built a workshop in the front portion of the flat. He would give electronic demonstration in the workshop, but also at schools and began to establish a measure of confidence with teenagers in the area. He also hired Piri Thomas, an indigenous Puerto Rican who had served eight years at the infamous Sing Sing prison. for killing a cop. Being a convicted felon who had done “prison time” gave him a measure of respect with the members of the gangs. To this day, I still do not understand what led to his release.
When it became known that two rival gangs were about to “go down” Piri would get the leaders of each gang and one other person for each gang, take them out to an island in the East River and have them have a “fair fight” No weapons were aloud, just fists, but more times than not it brought the potential of a deadly “rumble” to a halt. The rules to be followed were the same for each side in the conflict.
Now, let us extrapolate to the present stated and self-serving nature of the GOP. Their leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, seems to be hell bent on constantly changing the rules. As we all have witnessed. None more blatant than his position on Trump’s role in the January 6th Insurrection. On the one hand denouncing the president’s role in the Insurrection and on the other voting not to impeach. Holding up the process until after Trump was no longer president and then stating that impeachment cannot apply to a person who is no longer the president. Further, state after state continue to introduce and pass legislation to change the rules for voting. What is the GOP afraid of? Why can they not engage in a “fair fight” and see who wins. Changing the rules is unbelievably unfair, unethical, immoral and simply, wrong. Additionally, the Supreme Court seems to be laser-focused on dismantling the Voting Rights Act, piece by piece. Witness the latest decision regarding the Arizona modifications. Associate Justice Alito stated that discrimination alone is not a reason to declare the law unconstitutional. Guess he never read or understands the premise upon which the Voting Rights Act became law in the first place.
I know there has been a great deal of hysteria on both sides of this issue, but all that I am proposing is to make the fight a fair one. To make the rules and stand by them. To give all people the opportunity to exercise their right to vote. To refrain from being a pawn in the hands of the ex-president. To stop behaving like a group of children who did not get their way, so they pick up their bat and ball and go home. Come now, let us reason together—is that too much to ask?