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American Squalor
Have you noticed the squalor among your neighbors in recent years? We spent some time with friends this Labor Day weekend and they described the sad situation next door to them. A single mother with a severely special needs five-year-old and a teenaged son, presumably from different “fathers.” She’s had two live-ins with the same name in the time my friends have known her — I’ll call them “Bill.” There was “Bad Bill” who was replaced by “Good Bill.” The Police have made domestic calls even with “Good Bill” there, and our friends say it’s obvious he’s using drugs.
In my neighborhood a few streets over, I walked past a home with the front yard littered with gas cans and other debris. The driveway was covered with a full-sized carport tent, covering several newish, moderately expensive vehicles, but the garage was open, and I could see a mound of trash reaching to the ceiling with maybe just enough room to walk around the perimeter of the pile. It’s also been a tough year for yard maintenance, apparently. Things are looking rundown even on my street.
This isn’t like the hobos who’d disembark at the granary in our hometown, where people would direct them to our house, knowing my mother would invite them in and fix them a meal. Mother took seriously Christ’s injunction to care for the poor. Mr. C’s grandmother would do the same in Oklahoma during the depression, trading sandwiches for small tasks around the house.
But, this isn’t material poverty I’m noticing. It’s moral squalor, decadence. And, it’s most noticeable in these riots in the streets, where “mostly peaceful” protesters get up in the faces of people just trying to enjoy a meal out, or even worse incidents like knocking old ladies to the ground and setting buildings on fire.
Anthony Esolen would like to have a conversation about this, but it seems the Left and Democrats (but, I repeat) aren’t up for it. In The Poorest of the Poor, he writes about his Italian immigrant grandfather and those like him:
“When the miners came up to the free air at the end of the day, they were black from head to foot, but they were not squalid. Our patient now does not live a clean life. Not many people do, but when you are poor already you cannot afford the luxury of squalor.”
Even the poorest of the poor back in the day had a sense of responsibility to their families and communities. The hobos didn’t feel entitled to my mother’s and Mr. C’s grandmother’s charity. They were grateful for it and tried to give back in whatever small way they could.
This is not to say there were no morally depraved people back then. But, I think things are different now. And, I’ve expressed my frustration with the leadership of the Catholic church misidentifying what ails American society. It isn’t racism. To suggest it is to dishonor the work of MLK and civil rights activists who succeeded in making racism socially unacceptable. No, as my kids tire of hearing me say, it’s godlessness. It’s the disbelief in objective truth and the lack of accountability to a higher power.
We’re headed into some dark times and I believe the only thing that will pull us out of the nosedive is a religious revival. Let us pray.
Published in General
I think you’re on to something. While it’s worth being conscious of the pitfall of romanticizing the past, the good ol’ days, it’s quite possible that the old days were better in some respects. A person might be called a pessimist for inferring that these are the signs of civilizational collapse, along with the
riotsmostly peaceful protests, the debasement of the rule of law, and the degradation of our institutions: universities, entertainment industry, the fourth estate. Sometimes the pessimists are right.The West is in a mad flight from reality. Facts and reason no longer rule; 2+2=5 because math is a racist product of the patriarchy. Sometimes I want to yell at the pilot, “Pull up, pull up!” At some point it will be too late and the West will just auger in.
I haven’t seen it much where I live. Not in my neighborhood, which is more working class than middle class. The place is picked up, yards look nice. We don’t have a neighborhood association or a homeowners association to nag people, so it is all voluntary.
Of course this is in Texas, in a predominantly red county. But I do live in the biggest city in the county. And while nearby Houston has some skeevy areas, you really do not see the squalor I saw in other major cities.
Maybe Texans are the modern-day equivalent of the Elves of Rivendell.
Yes, on our one trip to Texas (New Braunfels, Hill Country area) we felt like we’d stepped back in time. It’s the America of my youth.
Well, come on down. Texas isn’t turning purple because of folks fleeing the garbage states. Those folks are voting red. Its the ones born and raised here that don’t know how bad long term Dem rule is that are voting blue. We can use more freedom lovers.
I can point you to rural small communities in Texas where substance abuse — meth, mainly — has created neighborhoods where people have higher priorities than keeping their yards clean and their homes maintained, and the result is often places that spiral into long-term decline because people just don’t want to move in next door to homes that cause their own property values to decline and neighbors who are a threat to their own personal safety.
When you get into situations like that, then you end up with a conflict between local government, which will put in place ordinances designed to force the worst offenders to clean up their properties, but which will catch residents who are in most cases following the rules, but get snared by the fact that beautification rules cannot be selectively enforced from home to home (i.e. — during the oil boom, people would park extra work truck vehicles or even truck tractor rigs in front of their homes or even in their yards because of a lack of space, but which were in violations of the laws to prevent people from just parking and leaving vehicles for weeks or months at a time in those locations. So to enforce the rules to keep those who didn’t care from messing up the look of the neighborhood, people who were working had to find yard parking space for their extra work vehicles if they did not have a company yard, get up and drive a different vehicle there and swap out for the day).
I worked in social welfare for 2 years, specifically dealing with lone parents. It was common that there would be households of children with different fathers. (Sometimes this was a ruse, saying the father (s) were unknown meant no maintenance to declare.) In a great many cases these children had some kind of special needs.
There’s been a rapid breakdown of social norms here in Ireland within less than 30 years. In the early 90’s couples were still more likely to marry before living together by the end of the decade that had changed. My own nephew, born in 1996 to parents who married aged 23 and 25, has been living with his girlfriend for the past 3 years. His girlfriend, whose father left the family when she was young, expressed surprise when she heard his parents had been married BEFORE he was born.
I have, ong said The break down of the family is the biggest problem in America, but it has a deeper precedent.
We have turned away from God.
Hear! Hear!
It doesn’t’t help that the FedGov had an active policy of trying to send Section 8 housing to as many suburban communities as possible which had the effect of spreading the squalor more widely around the country.
The squalor has become “normal” and what is normal is passed to new generations.
Jim, a coworker, once told me about his next-door neighbors – a family of women. There was a grandmother, her daughter, and her granddaughter. One day, Jim was working in his garage and the granddaughter came by. She wanted to ask him about his “strange” family; Jim had a wife and two kids. A mom, dad, and kids living together in the same house wasn’t normal to her.
What is modelled to kids has a huge impact on how they live their lives. My Dad was a mining engineer and G-d puts minerals at the ends of the earth, so I grew up far away from my cousins and grandparents. That was normal to me. You grew up, went to college, and left home.
As I got older, I learned that most people didn’t live that way. Many in my school had lived in the area for generations. But that didn’t seem right to me. Living in the same town as your parents was to be a failure. So, I did “normal.” I went to college and left.
I have no doubt that Jim’s little neighbor grew up and had what to her was a normal family.
Yep, it’s a cycle of moral poverty, not necessarily material poverty.
Yup. They increased the number Section 8 housing units in the apartment complex across the street from my condo development. The street has abandon shopping carts here and there — nothing says class like that. Every bus stop is trashed. And beggars take their positions at each end of the grocery store parking lot some days.
You can take people out of squalor, but you can’t take the squalor out of people.
You can add squalor, though. I’m currently reading Amity Shlaes’ new book, Great Society. Here’s a passage from her book about the (now infamous) Pruitti-Igoe housing project for which vibrant St Louis communities were bulldozed out of existence:
Tow Wolfe has a great passage in his book “From Our House to Bauhaus” about a community meeting of the people living at Pruitt-Igoe, where the authorities asked them what they thought should be done.
The crowd stared chanting “blow it up, blow it up”.
And thats what they did.
There’s a part from PJ O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores, where after he’s toured a public housing project in (Jersey?), he writes about all the terrible things he’s seen in his travels, warzones, people living in literal garbage piles, but there was no place he would less rather live than that public housing project.
I don’t tire of hearing you say it, WC. We should all pray.
This article demonstrates how a good intentioned destruction of housing projects caused widespread crime in Memphis. And of course the usual suspects denied it was happening.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/american-murder-mystery/306872/
From the French writer and aviator Antoine de St-Exupery:
A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them.
…and also:
Constrain them to join in building a tower, and you shall make them like brothers. But if you would have them hate each other, throw food amongst them.
So true. I often wonder if it’s the lack of hardship that leads people to depression and decadence.
…and now it seems that after blowing up the old projects, the Feds are intent on building new ones. I used to say about those projects, it would have been much better, in the long run, to have given the residents Title Deeds of ownership for those apartments rather than cheap rent. I believed in my heart that the “owners” would have maintained their property and kept out the drug dealers, whereas the “renters” couldn’t care less.
I think it is the lack of accomplishments that leads people to depression and decadence. Accomplishing things leads to satisfaction and fulfillment. Overcoming hardships is an accomplishment.
It is possible to accomplish great things without going through hardships, but it takes an awful lot of self-discipline. On the other hand, very often hardships force the accomplishment of overcoming it upon one. Your alternatives are often to succeed or die. If you succeed, you have the satisfaction gained through accomplishing something. If you die, depression and decadence is no longer an issue.
Based on stories I heard as a child (from my dad and his uncles and aunts) I suspect my dad would have lived and died an unhappy mama’s boy had he not been challenged by serving in combat in World War II. Simply getting away from home and surviving boot camp was the start of his success.
I’m hooked on Anthony Esolen’s new book: Sex and the Unreal City: The Demolition of the Western Mind. It’s almost weird how clear and beautiful his writing is.
Self-government/governing oneself – belief in a higher power, living according to the Ten Commandments. That cures pretty much all that ails us. Relearning “the tried and true”. Fathers and Men, Real Men, are critical in this.
Do write a review when you’ve finished. I’ll read anything by Esolen I can get my eyeballs on.
He also talks about a free market solution by Jack Kemp Bush seniors Housing chief who proposed the tenants have a chance to purchase their units, and non of them had the slightest interest.
Hard men make good times.
Good times make soft men.
Soft men make hard times.
Hard times make hard men.
Rinse and repeat…
Thank you. Will do. I love his work.
Sigh. It’s all just the fall. Call it godlessness, broken families, whatever, but those are all downstream. Individual behavior is emergent, and societal behavior is emergent again. People will believe lies unless they are continuously reminded of reality.
Yabbut, societies travel through peaks and valleys from fairly decent common standards to moral turpitude. Looks like we’re headed for the valley.