r/AskReddit • u/DrCompenomics • 13h ago

Who’s the best real-life example of “you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” and what happened?

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u/azad_ninja 11h ago

People forget he was despised prior to 9/11 as well by many New Yorkers. He “cleaned up” Manhattan for corporations by being pretty heartless to homeless people, and using the cops to intimidate everyone he targeted.

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u/Blecher_onthe_Hudson 8h ago

I lived in NYC from 1984 on. He was viewed as successful because of how the City had previously been seen as ungovernable and out of control. David Dinkins was a good man, but not up to the task. Law & order was a national movement, Bill Clinton was vilified also for supporting crime crackdowns. But that was what it took to get elected then.

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u/Malphos101 7h ago

Its just a case of "things were so bad even a moron like HIM seemed like a good guy to some people."

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u/TastyBrainMeats 7h ago

Teachers hated him before anybody else did.

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u/Blecher_onthe_Hudson 7h ago

Sorry, but teachers unions hate anyone who stand up to them. Municipal unions are draining the life out of blue cities. Negotiations between public unions and elected officials doesn't resemble private employment unions in the least. You can't have good faith negotiating when elections allow the labor side to twist the arm of the elected officials.

The unions and Board of Ed here in Jersey City are out of fucking control, they spend $34,000 per student for failing results, and property taxes are on track to go up over 20% over the next 2 years in one of the few blue cities that is building housing like crazy.

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u/Annath0901 2h ago

On the other hand, my mom is a behavior specialist/former special ed teacher in a state where the teacher's union basically doesn't exist for all intents and purposes.

The school district she worked for went 10 straight years with zero pay increase, not even a cost of living adjustment. Then they increased employee insurance costs. So she was making less money, by every metric, than when she started. The straw that broke the camel's back for her was when the district told her she had to go back to being a classroom special ed teacher while still being employed as a behavior specialist.

By this time my mom was almost 60 and had had a hip replacement, so she was in no condition to be doing restraints on violent middle school age kids and/or getting bite wound requiring stitches, so she left for a different job.

But yeah, there's a middle ground between greedy public unions and useless public unions.

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u/Blecher_onthe_Hudson 51m ago

The disparities across the US are astonishing and do not track with the proportional changes in cost of living. The median teacher in my district makes $95,000. And they still complain. There are cops here making over 200k.

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u/Linenoise77 8h ago

Despised is a strong word. There is a lot more nuance to the feelings of the city in the 90s.

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u/azad_ninja 7h ago

I recall he was a popular state attorney/state prosecutor(?) at some point because he took on the mob stranglehold on the ports. But once h became mayor, I dont recall a lot of positive press about his public or private life

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u/Linenoise77 7h ago

Yeah, there are arguments that his approach, attention, and focus on the traditional italian mob strengthened other groups, notably the russian mob, some of which he may have personally benefited from later on, but a lot of that is speculation.

Like I said, in the 90s there was a collective feeling that stuff had gotten a bit too far (and it had), and a good chunk of the city was cool just looking the other way while stuff got sorted, and then you could bitch about it later and say how wrong it was because you weren't directly part of it.

Because that is how NYC works.

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u/ForQ2 5h ago

He “cleaned up” Manhattan for corporations

I think that's unfair. He cleaned it up for everybody. I spent plenty of time in NYC in the 70s and 80s (and had four years of high school there), and it's easy to overlook just how unsafe huge swaths of the city felt back then. The Guardian Angels were formed in 1979 in an attempt to make subways marginally safer, and many people wouldn't even ride the subways because of the constant stories of robberies, sexual assaults, and murders that happened there. Many New Yorkers cheered for Bernhard Goetz's shooting of four people on a subway, because it felt like someone was fighting back against the city's rampant criminal element. Lots of people (including Donald Trump, as we all know) called for the execution of the Central Park Five because, in the minds of many, the accused teens became the face of out-of-control crime in the city.

The city was dangerous, period, and parts of it were seedy indeed (e.g. 42nd Street, filled with adult movie theaters, bookstores, peep shows, and prostitutes).

Rudy Giuliani was definitely a piece of shit, and ramped it up to 11 during the first Trump presidency. But he deserves credit for what he did to NYC in the 90s, not condemnation.

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u/VelvetyDogLips 7h ago

Was it Rudy, or Police Commissioner Kelly, who started stop-n'-frisk? Or both?

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u/azad_ninja 7h ago

Maybe Bernard Kerik?

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u/Bearded_Gentleman 5h ago

Kelly. Stop and Frisk started under Bloomberg's administration.

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u/SizzleanQueen 1h ago

I was a social worker for the city back then. We all hated him for pushing marginalized people out of the city to the fringes with fewer services available. Then he was a hero overnight. I’m glad it came full circle because he’s a dangerous clown.