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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 was on an engine crew deployed one time to a house that was in the path of a big wildfire. The guys managed to keep the fire away from us but while we were setting up I noticed a beer bottle laying in the front yard. And then another, until we realized there were probably 100+ beer bottles laying in the unmowed grass surrounding this nice little brick house at the end of a road in the boonies. I remember we talked about it – there must have been a first time that it seemed like a good idea. Did he (or she) sit on his porch every night and just heave the empties out there? No one was home, but I don’t think I would have asked them.
Years later we went back for a person complaining of medical issues – a younger guy (I think he was in drug withdrawal). Before we transported him we had to call his parole officer so when his ankle monitor went off they wouldn’t come looking for him.
Just finished reading the article. Wow.
So sad.
I wish I had my brother’s ability to confront people with the truth in a kindly manner, though. If no one ever says anything to these people, don’t you think they’re left with the impression their squalor is “normal?”
I think this is what is going on. When people started to treat religion and worship as optional, then the things that are taught about God’s plan start to become optional too: marry first, children second….work for your living….help the poor.
Only a highly educated academic could be stupid enough not to see what that program was going to do.
Government housing programs have been a disaster in so many ways. For example, they’ve:
“Experts” and central planners have done more harm. . .
I think it was Churchill who said experts necessarily have limited knowledge, since they focus exclusively on their area of expertise. And yet we treat them like omniscient gods (Fauci).
The poor don’t need relocated — they need converted!
“Blowing up” the building and then building a new project with the same rules, doesn’t change anything.
Section 8 housing is a godsend for disabled people. My mom’s apartment building in Hyannis was home to many people using the program and having a decent place to live because of it. Many were nearly blind or in wheelchairs. The local social services helpers could keep in touch with the people who lived in the apartments, and the people lived in a downtown location and weren’t isolated or cut off from the local stores and churches and events like the concerts and parades.
I think like everything else, how well it works depends on the individuals involved in the program. On Cape Cod, the Section 8 program is run by our local Housing Assistance Corporation, which does an amazing job helping people find and keep decent housing.
The fact of the matter is that we can’t just create programs and then walk away. Civic engagement is what matters most–people getting involved in their local government, from the libraries to the schools to the police and fire departments. In the Hyannis area, the Council of Churches is deeply involved in the lives of the people who need help.
That’s part of the problem, isn’t it? That we can’t trust agencies to do their jobs, and do them well, unless church groups or whoever are always looking for their shoulders.
The New Left in the Sixties scoffed at marriage – just a piece of paper! An oppressive institution! – and championed drug use as a means of “expanding consciousness” and also being so very anti-bourgeoise. Then the elites who drank deep of this nonsense got married and avoided drug habits, and did well. But they preached the liberation doctrine to everyone else, in the name of being progressive. And here we are.
As @peterrobinson among others have pointed out, it’s disgustingly scandalous – or scandalously disgusting, or both – how many people won’t preach what they practice. i.e., “liberals” who actually live their own lives by rules they wouldn’t dream of “imposing” on their “followers.”
I think this is not limited to people with limited means or America. I see it among the affluent, I see it in Europe. It’s a kind of soullessness and moral laziness (see Douglas Murray). All the kids glued to iPads and tablets. This tired recourse (at least in France) to the “a relationship isn’t necessarily forever” trope and that stupid fantasy about “freedom.” Those tired “I hate my spouse / I hate my kids / Parents will find a vaccine” thing during the lockdown. (I personally adore being with my husband and children. I cannot imagine, literally cannot, even THINKING otherwise let alone saying it).
People don’t aspire to anything besides physical comfort.
I didn’t sleep well last night (full disclosure) so I am feeling a bit grim today.
Goes back to the 1960s liberal guilt trip/virtue signaling belief that in order for America to make up for past wrongs to people who had been discriminated against, they had to celebrate everything about their lifestyle, including the parts that were anti-social or self-defeating. They personally weren’t going to practice them, but they also weren’t going to lecture others about negative behaviors, and that included the growth in families without fathers, or the denigration of beneficial education (as opposed to much of the current higher education, which only seeks to indoctrinate).
Over the past 55 or so years, you’ve seen that harden from a refusal to criticize negative behaviors you wouldn’t tolerate living around yourself, to attempting to destroy anyone, even across racial lines, who dares to say a celebration of anti-social culture might not be the best thing in the world for people in the bottom rungs of society (at the same time, many of the white Antifa trust-fund types who get even more involved with the fight to maintain that culture do it knowing they have either the cash directly or the family financial support system to extract themselves from the consequences of the worst of their behavior. That’s not the case for those who end up trapped in the areas where those behaviors occur).
So when we are there as first responders it’s really not professional to comment on something like that. But…this is very rural. These are old family ranches that were founded by hard working German immigrants; some were founded when there were still Comanche raiding parties. The ranches are slowly broken up as time goes by, into smaller and smaller tracts until no one can actually make a living off of the land, and often families descend into the same sort of self destructive behavior described in Hillbilly Elegy. At this house I was talking about the current occupant is a convicted sex offender; in a nearby double wide trailer there was a cousin who basically drank himself to death at age 42.
Wealth buys second and third chances. The poor don’t often have that luxury.
Yes, I imagine it is in Europe, too. In fact, the first time I encountered the British “underclass” was on the return trip from London after my first time overseas. I sat next to a youngish man, maybe late twenties, who was taking his first, and likely once-in-a-lifetime, trip to “the States.” And you know where he was going? Hollyweird and Disneyland.
Now, I’m not an outdoorsman exactly, but I do live in a remarkably beautiful place and, as a family, we’ve made it point to see many of the natural wonders in this country. I view it as a kind of “soullessness” to seek out movie stars and the manufactured “happiest place on earth” (tell it to parents of toddlers at 2 in the afternoon). It would be like visiting the UK and skipping London and its amazing history. Or going to Paris and avoiding the Louvre. If “the glory of God is man fully alive,” how tragic that so many of our fellow men live such diminished, purposeless existences.
Ack. Now I’m depressed.
There’s something different going on here, though. I’m writing about people who live in middle class neighborhoods, have jobs, and are materially much better off than Anthony Esolen’s coal miner grandfather. They are not “poor” in the conventional sense. I would say they lack social virtues — caring for oneself, one’s property, one’s family, and one’s community.
Esolen’s Italian immigrant grandfather didn’t suffer that kind of “chestless” existence. He had the faith of his fathers and the virtues that went with it.
And if there’s enough wealth, it can still keep them afloat even if they waste the additional chances too.
We know a woman lawyer. She shares our nanny with us four days a week. Her two children are by two different fathers. The eldest is about 8, and he’s sort of forlorn (when he isn’t uncontrolled and rambunctious). He spends all day on his iPad (when not being whisked to Corsica by his dad or going to his private bilingual school). He has no manners. I feel deeply sorry for him.
His pretty mother once showed me on her phone photos a photographer friend had taken of herself, reminiscent of the photos you get your senior year of high school. Glamour shots leaning coyly on trees and whatnot. I thought it was unbelievably pathetic. She posts them on Facebook and a chorus of idiots who call themselves her friends say “gorgeous!”
For me she is one of those people who I think has suffered (though she doesn’t know it! She has all the usual Euro-lefty conformist nonsense politics) from the decline in religion. She literally has no idea what her purpose is on this earth.
And, sadly, she is incapable of passing along any such purpose to her child(ren).
This works. Detroit is experimenting with charity-built tiny house communities where the residents pay an affordable rent for 7 years and end up owning the house. These are safe, affordable and well-maintained places to live. Singapore apartments are owned by their residents and they cannot move to a different place until they have someone ready to buy their old place. So they take good care of each unit. Their cities are cleaner than ours.
Well, there are some modern Pauls and Josephs out there to give us hope:
https://www.crisismagazine.com/2020/virtue-over-victimhood
At least, maybe we can say that American Squalor is (usually) the squalor of affluence, not the squalor of poverty.
Which is worse?
That depends how you look at it, of course. But in 1000 years or 10,000 or whatever, someone who digs up piles of discarded beer bottles etc, would know that the civilization was prosperous. Unlike digging up “Native American” sites that reveal crushing poverty, disease, war, and even cannibalism.
The word you’re looking for is Decadence.
But that wouldn’t really replace Squalor. It would modify Squalor. So you have the Squalor of Decadence, or the Squalor of Poverty.
Decadent squalor sounds about right.