Punk riots. Skinheads. Before special snowflakes, SJWs, or the alt-right’s revolt against “the tyranny of nice” became a thing, musical subcultures I can’t even pretend to understand fractured along white-nationalist and anti-white-nationalist lines.

I can’t claim to understand the punk ethos – or ethe, ethea, or ethoses (fittingly, there are multiple ways to pluralize “ethos”) – but the news of my youth was vaguely colored by incidental stories of “direct action,” of “taking it to the streets,” of punks getting their riot gear ready. Often, the “oppression” they fought was gentrification, one more manifestation, apparently, of “the tyranny of nice.”

I’ve heard middle-aged punk aficionados reminisce about NYC back before it was cleaned up – before it, too succumbed to “the tyranny of nice.” And of course there are the skinheads. Rude boys. Toughs. The way “skinhead” is used in the news, a gal could be forgiven for only finding out not all skinheads are racist when she looks them up on Wikipedia.