The Kensington strangler has struck again. Police have said that the third victim is likely connected to the two previous killings, which were connected by DNA tests. There were also three women in the same area who got away from someone who tried to strangle them (since they were prostitutes, at first they didn’t bother to report it).
It’s kind of strange. These murders are happening not that far from my house and the places I go, but because they’re literally on the other side of the tracks (in this case, the elevated train tracks on Frankford Avenue), they might as well be on the other side of the moon.
The women who have been killed all had past drug problems and probably relapsed. Someone on the news, a local man, was interviewed: “It’s getting to the point where you’re afraid to get in a car with a stranger.” (My friend wisecracked, “Like it was perfectly okay to get in a car with a stranger up until then?”)
But, you know, that’s life on the other side of the tracks: Crack addicts, open-air drug markets, bombed out buildings, women giving blowjobs in cars to get the money for a quick high.
It would be a lot easier to park my car there and take the train downtown; a lot cheaper, too. But I’m not going near that neighborhood at night, and I don’t know if my car would be there when I got back, anyway.
Yeah Suze, I understand your references to the “other side of the tracks”, and you know what?…………. more and more of “us” are having to join “them” on the “other side” just to survive.
Personally, I know about the “other side”—–been there, done that, in harsher times and younger years—-because (I know it’s a cliche’, but it’s true) desperate people DO do desperate things just to make it from day-to-day. Hey, welcome to “The Greatest Country on Earth”!
If things go on the way they are, most of us will be living on the other side of the tracks.
95% of America is the other side of the tracks. It seems to me that this is an exemplar of the real ‘class warfare’ that’s been waged against workers by the wealthy forever.