Cape Anne Girl is correct; Gloucester is, despite some current attempts to change the “tone” of the community, a ramshackle town. It was a working seaport for 300 years, and the recent closing of the fishing areas that supported the community for many decades have hit the town harder than the surrounding area, where fishing wasn’t as big a part of the residents’ incomes and the shift to tony seaside bedroom community (Beverley, Rockport [the REAL Cape Anne artists colony],Manchester-By-The-Sea, etc.) was easier.
Gloucester is 40 minutes from downtown Boston. I take the trip quite often from my home in Melrose, 2 towns north of Boston, and it rarely takes me any more than 25 minutes on Friday nights; it’s a straight shot up Route 128, and downtown Gloucester is all of 5 minutes from the highway. Isolated it’s not.
Here in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, the pravda (Truth) comes from the top that there was no “pact” between these girls, and the official line is that this is just an aberration, and that after having on average 4 pregnancies each year, having 17 this year is just something that happened out of the blue (or pink). The large-P Pravda, or Boston Globe if you prefer, asks us to swallow that 4 times the average number of girls get pregnant, “almost all sophomores”, and it’s just a statistical anomaly.
Funny to me is how the reactions to this story reflect the attitudes that have no meaning today. These girls are doing the same thing, to use a local comparison, that black girls from Roxbury and Mattapan are doing. Why are they getting all this attention? Is it our racist liberal media reacting in disbelief when white girls do the same stupid things as black girls, who of course don’t know any better?
People from Gloucester, or Roxbury for that matter, don’t want to hear that it’s not a black or Italian or Catholic problem. It’s a class problem.
