I'm not a sociologist, Belette. But it's a lot of things. Years ago most Italians here were dirt poor, yet there would be about ten percent of the neighborhood driving Cadillacs while your own father might have been making a hundred dollars a week. It's the pull of the street (which is disappearing as Italian-Americans assimilate more and more). And most of all, it's living with these guys (even if you're not one of them) for forty or fifty years.
Now there are many more well-versed individuals on this board when it comes to charts and reports and all of that. But from where I'm standing, there are just certain things that I can't explain. When you're 55 years old, you'll know a great deal more about the people you grew up with than someone who read about them in The United States. You'll see.
Thanks PB, yeah I'm most interested in the human aspect of all this. Especially when the bright guys go into it, even though it would seem they have other options too. I guess like you say, you deal with these guys all your life since you were a kid, it alters your morals in a certain way unless you pay special attention and be even smarter than the bright guys. Maybe it's like war, the guys who are insightful and consider the morals of things will never last long. The ones who accept the crude reality and simply accept the rules of the game will do just fine.
And then there are the opportunist psychopaths who will sell their mother when it comes the time to save your ass.
