I urge you to read Charles Murray’s very interesting and, at least to me, troubling op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on how America has become divided into tracks. I think that’s a more appropriate word that classes or castes. I’ve posted one set of observations stimulated by it already today but I’ve got more to say and I’ll say it here.
I think that Dr. Murray is right about this:
For explaining the formation of the new lower class, the easy explanations from the left don’t withstand scrutiny. It’s not that white working class males can no longer make a “family wage” that enables them to marry. The average male employed in a working-class occupation earned as much in 2010 as he did in 1960. It’s not that a bad job market led discouraged men to drop out of the labor force. Labor-force dropout increased just as fast during the boom years of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s as it did during bad years.
but I think he’s wrong about this:
As I’ve argued in much of my previous work, I think that the reforms of the 1960s jump-started the deterioration. Changes in social policy during the 1960s made it economically more feasible to have a child without having a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let the government deal with problems in your community that you and your neighbors formerly had to take care of.
Quite to the contrary I think that almost all of what Dr. Murray talks about can be explained by technological and social changes. I would point to the following as examples of interacting technological and social changes:
- The automobile made it possible for those with means to live separately from those who worked for them, either in their homes or in their places of business.
- The typewriter opened up positions for a significant number of women in the workplace.
- “The Pill” gave women more control over their own reproduction. It rendered unwanted pregnancies less likely. The legalizing and subsequent acceptability of abortion was one of the factors that meant that when a man impregnated a woman marriage was not the inevitable outcome.
- Increasing opportunities for women rendered marriage less of an economic necessity.
I’m skeptical that the federal government is the main engine of social change, as Dr. Murray is suggesting. I would be more open to the suggestion that government policy follows social change already in progress and frequently has unforeseen and unintended consequences.
I would also point to the improved economic and social standing of Catholics and Jews which I will acknowledge is partially a consequence of government policy but I believe is a pretty good example of government policy merely following social change that’s already under way. I’ll focus on Catholics, the group about which I know more. Catholics are more predisposed to marry other Catholics than American, generally, are to marrying within their own religious denominations. They are more likely to marry than Americans, generally, and less likely to divorce. For substantiation of these claims see here. That’s provided Catholics with a significant economic advantage. As Catholic acculturate (as the article notes is taking place) that will be less of an advantage going forward.
Our educational system is geographically based. When you combine geographical isolation of people with differing backgrounds (something that has not always been the case), the increasing importance of formal education as agriculture and then manufacturing became less important, assortative mating is at least as good an explanation for what we’ve seen over the last couple of decades as Dr. Murray’s federal government policy social policy is.
Perhaps the short version of what I’m suggesting is that rich men don’t marry chorus girls as frequently as they used to not because there are fewer rich men but because a) movies and television have meant that there are fewer chorus girls; b) rich men can gain sexual access to pretty girls outside their own social circles without marrying them more easily than they used to; and c) they aren’t expected to marry them even if the girls become pregnant.
Quite to the contrary I think that almost all of what Dr. Murray talks about can be explained by technological and social changes. I would point to the following as examples of interacting technological and social changes:
The average male employed in a working-class occupation earned as much in 2010 as he did in 1960. [ em-PHA-sis added ]
Nicely caveated, Dr. Murray!
“Quite to the contrary I think that almost all of what Dr. Murray talks about can be explained by technological and social changes. ”
I agree entirely. Schumpterian creative destruction cannot be described solely in terms of new economic enterprises replacing old and outmoded ones. Capitalism also transforms social institutions. I’ve argued for a long time that social conservatives who are staunch defenders of capitalism are in a bind that they seem unaware of. You cannot simultaneously argue strongly for an economic system that enhances individual liberty and power and then decry the inevitable velocity of that enhancement — the attenuation of social institutions that thusly empowered individuals perceive as impediments to the exercise of their new-found liberty. Wicked liberals seem to get this, pious conservatives, not at all.
safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences ….
Um, I’d like to call bullshit. Exactly what has happened to the incarceration rate in the last several decades? Since (roughly) the resignation of Richard Nixon it has been sky-rocketing. I don’t think getting locked into a Federal “pound-me-in-the-ass” prison is inconsequential. Or a state or local “pound-me-in-the-ass” prison either.
sam, the paleocons certainly understood the fundamental contradiction and tragedy of conservatism. Remember what William F. Buckley said? “A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’”
I’m not sure about the significance of the automobile on the extremes here. The stats on Glencoe in the related entry show that about 35% of the houses were built before 1940. I think the train is more responsible for early wealthy communities being able to seperate themselves from a central city; cars are more responsible for middle class and upper middle class doing so after WWII to present.
I’d also look to culture (it doesn’t seem to be as important historically for the Southern rich to live apart as it does for Yankees), and Progressive era urban planning (Euclidean Zoning, 1926).
There’s so much nonsense in the Murray piece it’s hard to know where to start.
His proof? A De Tocqueville anecdote and nostalgia. How was that cultural equality between Jews and gentiles? Gays and straights? Irish and non? Men and women? (He acknowledges that things may have been just a wee bit unequal between whites and blacks, but glosses over the fact that said inequality was often expressed in lynchings.) Does Murray actually think a protestant Brahmin in Boston was on familiar terms with his Irish maid? Good grief. How about the factory owner and his workers? The mine owner and his Chinese workers?
Say what now, old, out-of-touch academic dude? Music? Hello? TV? Movies? Fashion? Language? I don’t think we’ve ever had so much up-from-the-bottom cultural influence. Where does he think jazz, blues, rock, hip hop came from? These were not upper class phenomena gifted to the proles by their betters. It’s not the poor people dressing in suits to emulate the rich anymore, it’s rich guys in jeans and ironic t-shirts trying to pass as kids, wearing their baseball caps backward to look gangsta, or old white guys using words like “gangsta,” for that matter.
I can’t tell you about Boston but I can tell you with confidence that in St. Louis poor and rich lived, literally, side by side. Their children played together and often went to school together, at least in primary grades. Look at the Lemp House and the photos of it. The house of the owner of Falstaff beer was right next to much smaller, more modest dwellings. Their servants and their families lived there.
I’d also meant to mention the changes that happened during the Great Depression of the 1930s. “Live-in” help became much less fashionable than it had been. It used to be the case the upper middle class people always had help. Maids, handymen, gardeners, etc. What’s changed is that those people generally work for many families rather than just one and they don’t live nearby. I think a lot of the reason for that is the automobile.
PD:
There’s a lot of truth in your observations. Along the North Shore the electric North Shore and Milwaukee Road was an important form of commuter transport to and from Chicago. It ran from about 1899 to 1950. I see that as an extension of my observations rather than a contradiction of them. Electric rail was the pre-auto revolutionary technological innovation. My point is that technology enabled the well-to-do to move away from their servants and, since public education has always been highly local, it removed the children of the well-to-do from the schools that the children of the poor attended.
My dad, a distinctly upper middle class kid, went to primary school with the children of the poor. So did I until my family moved out into the suburbs.
“I’m not sure about the significance of the automobile on the extremes here. ”
One thing I’m sure on–the automobile facilitated the sexual revolution…
I don’t think physical proximity within the household equalled cultural equality or commonality. Growing up in the south in the 60’s you’d see black and white kids playing together. It wasn’t equality or anything like it. In ancient times (and not so ancient) children were nursed and raised by slaves, that didn’t change much when it was time for one to sell the other like cattle.
Nowadays physical distances are largely mitigated by electronic communications. My son has friends of various races scattered from local Bay Area to London to Hong Kong. I talk to fans spread all around the world — Singapore, Turkey and Qatar just recently, along with many French, Aussies, Dutch, Brits. Crossing age and nationality and language barriers to share common interests — cultural interests. Let alone similar connections here in the states. So if the car has driven (heh) us apart then code has brought us back together.
Again, Michael, my point has to do with the local character of schools. When schools are local where you live is important. That it’s important today is illustrated by the premium on houses in “good districts”.
I’ll offer up a half-baked theory on Occupy and the Tea Party: one is ahead, the other behind the curve.
The Tea Partiers are angry at elites for leaving them behind: the sexual revolution, the rights revolutions, greater freedom of expression, secularism, urbanization, etc…
The Occupy generation can’t believe the elites are still trapped in what look to them like ancient paradigms — parties, churches, generations, races, classes.
The Tea Party is still upset over Roe v. Wade, the Occupy generation is upset over SOPA. The new institutions aren’t churches or parties they’re Facebook and Reddit. On Reddit no one knows of you’re rich, poor, black, white, Jewish, Catholic, gay or straight.
Is there actual evidence that Tea Party supporters are mostly social conservatives? Most of those involved in the Tea Party movement with whom I’m personally acquainted aren’t.
My recollection is that the Tea Party supporters tend to avoid social issues because of the divisions within the ranks on those issues.
I think that most people marry people they went to school with or work with or met through people they went to school with or work with. What you’re suggesting as the role of social media may be true in the future but I don’t think it’s the case now, except marginally.
True, no doubt. I’m focusing more on Murray’s nostalgic notion that there’s some kind of earlier state of cultural homogeneity that has now broken down. I think that’s nonsense.
No doubt true, but even in those days there were Catholic schools, Jewish schools, segregated black schools, prep schools, and different classes tracked differently within public schools. Poor kids were often diverted into work, rich kids went to college.
I will side mostly with Dave here. Growing up in small towns in the Midwest, poor and rich kids went to the same schools. Maybe not the same parties, but there was interaction. Now, there are private schools everywhere. The wealthy are much more isolated.
@Ice-Nice pick up on Murray’s spin. I would have missed that. Also have to wonder how he defines working class. Professional, ideologically driven pundits really are pretty good at their choice of words.
@Dave- In some states it took a change of law to make the Pill legal.
Steve
http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Tea-Party-and-Religion.aspx
Steve:
That may have been true of smaller towns. But in a place like New York City? There were upper east side kids and there were Harlem kids and I don’t think they attended the same schools. Cities offered more choices. And in the south, where I spent most of my school years, there may have been rich white with poor white but there definitely were no black kids or Mexicans.
There were black kids in the inner city parochial school I attended from kindergarten through third grade and there were black kids in the high school I attended.
There were no black kids in the suburban parochial school I attended in grades 4 through 8. I take that as substantiation of my point.
It’s possible that St. Louis was atypical. It’s my understanding that St. Louis’s public school system was the first major school system in the nation to be fully racially integrated. Same with the St. Louis archdiocesan schools.
St. Louis had very, very few Hispanics until the 1970s. Most were descendants of the Spaniards who lived there when Louisiana was a Spanish possession. The only Mexican-Americans I knew as a kid were family—my second cousins, children of my mom’s uncle. There was a tiny Mexican-American neighborhood in St. Louis that we visited occasionally.
Michael,
I think it’s more a sense of knowing how the other half lives. Today you have neighborhoods zoned and built to accommodate certain demographics. No one today, with a few exceptions, builds mixed-use neighborhoods or neighborhoods that allow differing socio-economic classes. If one lives in a cookie-cutter neighborhood and commutes to work, then one doesn’t get much chance to interact with with different kinds of people. The zoning and building practices of the last 30-40 years promotes this. Add geography-based education to this and what we end up with is a stratified society where each “class” is homogenous.
Yes, but that only makes it worse because you are interacting with online personas of people and not actual people. And you are really an anomaly – most people don’t have fans from many countries to interact with. And, more often, people are able to work from home thanks telecommuting, so there’s even less chance to interact with people who aren’t mostly like you.
Sitting, safely ensconced, in my upper-middle class cookie-cutter neighborhood and chatting/working on the internet with mostly anonymous others isn’t remotely the same thing as living next door to someone with 1/4 or 10x your income.
In short the “societal changes” Dave talks about have been formalized into zoning ordinances, planned development communities and homeowner’s associations and the stratification created by those policies are getting reinforced by communication technology.
And yet I haven’t learned to check my code.
Michael- I am really a numbers guy, but I dont know where to look for numbers on this. My sense is that some areas in the country looked like what you describe, but that it was less prevalent in the past. Besides schools, the military also had a leveling effect. I think you are correct in that people, even in my small towns, still lived separately and socialized separately, but there was more mixing than there is now in some of our institutions, largely government run ones.
Where I think Murray is not really correct is in assigning all blame to government policy. I think the basic social changes that Dave points out were more important. Real culture warriors will claim it was government legalizing abortion and the pill that abetted these changes, but there was international movement in these areas.
Steve
Michael,
Yes, but the people here at this site are not most Americans – we are atypical. And the thing with the internet is that you can turn it off if it gets uncomfortable – something you can’t do with your neighbors. It’s one thing to read about, for example, Icepick’s circumstances here – I think it would be quite something else if Icepick lived next door to me. At least it would be very different for me. Proximity is less important in some ways, but not in all the important ways.
Believe me, as someone who moves every 2-3 years, I get what you’re saying about the technology – my ability to maintain friendships worldwide is thanks to this technology. But it also comes with a dark side. For one thing I don’t feel the pull to meet my new neighbors like I used to – after all, my friends are online and just a FaceTime or Skype away.
So I think the technology gives people the choice to live in a bubble. Interacting with different people and being exposed to new ideas requires an affirmative action by each individual. How many people make that choice vs. choosing what they already know?
You and I both spend a lot of time online. How often do our interactions lead to greater understanding? How many times has someone on an OTB comment thread been persuaded for example? Online communication is a two-edge sword in my opinion and it can’t make up for human face-to-face interaction.
“The average male employed in a working-class occupation earned as much in 2010 as he did in 1960.”
Did a discussion of Murray’s op-ed really need to go beyond the above quote? Because Murray deliberately excluded inflation-adjustment so that he could falsely claim the working class hasn’t lost ground.
it’s rich guys in jeans and ironic t-shirts trying to pass as kids, wearing their baseball caps backward to look gangsta
What? How old are you? White kids in the suburbs in the South (and elsewhere in the South, I can’t speak for the rest of the country) were wearing caps backwards before gangster rap had been created, much less before it misspelled itself into gangsta rap. (They may have been doing so before rap came out of NYC, I just don’t personally remember back that far.) I don’t even remember seeing black kids wearing caps much in the early 1980s. Every wanna-be redneck trucker type wore them, though, and frequently backwards.
True, no doubt. I’m focusing more on Murray’s nostalgic notion that there’s some kind of earlier state of cultural homogeneity that has now broken down. I think that’s nonsense.
Everyone living in close proximity will produce social homogeniety on some issues, such as: support for local schools, support for crime prevention in the same neighborhoods, the desire for more uniform utilities, etc. That isn’t unimportant. Now the poor people get shunted off to Bithlo (where they can’t even get clean water to drink) and the rich end up living in Lake Nona, where nothing is too good for the locals, even building SEVERAL new hospitals and a new med school. (Local Orlando examples.)
I agree w/ Dave about cars and autos serving similar technology functions; I just want to point out that the trend is longer.
When Lincoln lived in Springfield, and it was a walking city, the rich concentrated in an area of the city known as Aristocracy Hill. I think Dave is right to point out that a servant class existed in both even in middle class neighborhoods, but the the main benefits were to those living in or near the wealthy neighborhoods. For blacks, in Springfield, this might mean protection from racial laws or even mob violence; it might even serve as a gateway to entrepreneurial opportunities and personal wealth.
In my mind, there is a natural tendency for the wealthy to use that wealth to live near others of similar tastes and backgrounds (see Mark Twain); the need for servants may modify this tendency, but technology has overcome a lot of it; racial/ethnic/religious heterogeneity has encouraged a competing tendency, sometimes to the benefit of minorities, sometimes not. Transportation technology and greater wealth has magnified these tendencies, and education is last, a victim of the previous trends.
@Andy, I remember being on the reverse end of the stick being a new neighbor. When my wife and I were newlyweds, we rented a house in a primarily owner-occupied nuclear-family neighborhood. We had a number of nice people come up and introduce themselves, but when they found out we were renters, I never heard from them again. They didn’t want commit the time to us. (And indeed, we were kind of looking around to find a house to buy and I had soured on this neighborhood)
Off-topic: How well is Japan really doing?
https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/spiked-eamonn-fingleton/
And in the south, where I spent most of my school years, there may have been rich white with poor white but there definitely were no black kids or Mexicans.
In large parts of the South that bit about Mexicans is a complete non-starter. We didn’t HAVE Mexicans in large areas of the South. When I was a kid East Central Florida was about 80% white and 20% black. The number of OTHER amounted to about 1% as of 1980, and for some reason the OTHER seemed to be mostly Vietnamese and Philipino, at least in the parts of town I spent time in.
I was thinking about this a few months back, and growing up I knew exactly three kids of hispanic origin. One really hot girl whose family was from Columbia, and two very Anglicized guys who I believe were of Cuban descent, but I don’t really know. And I went to a very large highschool, and knew kids from around town. In retrospect I knew more Jewish kids, but I didn’t realize that until I was grown. I also knew a couple of kids whose families hailed from the Soviet Union. Mexicans just weren’t thought of because Mexicans just weren’t here.
And you [Michael Reynolds] are really an anomaly – most people don’t have fans from many countries to interact with.
He might be anomalous, but perhaps not as much so as you think. I don’t have fans all over the world, but I play chess online. And I’ve played people from at least six of the continents. (I can’t remember if I actually played someone in Antartica or not – I remember seeing someone that was down there once, but I just don’t remember if I ever got to play them or not.) One day I played games with people from five different continents in under 90 minutes. (I was missing Africa and Antartica that day – couldn’t find anyone in Egypt or Johannsburg that day. Grrr.)
Not everyone plays chess, of course, but lots of people play online poker*, or WoW, or any number of other games I have probably never heard of, and sometimes one strikes up conversations.
* I used to play online poker, and it wasn’t uncommon to end up at a table with one American (me), a Finn, a Ukranian and five or six Russians.
Ice:
You’re right: the Bubbas used to wear backward caps. I’d forgotten that. As for Hispanics I wonder to what extent they were there but invisible as migrants? I concede their numbers have grown, and I wasn’t exactly doing demographic research at the time so I wonder.
Regarding hot Colombians: do you watch Modern Family?
Yes, but the people here at this site are not most Americans – we are atypical.
Perhaps, but thirty years ago, even twenty years ago, people like us didn’t exist at all. Even ten years ago it was rather rare, when those weird things called “blog” were just getting hot. Didn’t exist 30 years ago, very rare ten years ago, atypical now, commonplace five years from now, everyone is doing it ten years from now.
It’s one thing to read about, for example, Icepick’s circumstances here – I think it would be quite something else if Icepick lived next door to me. At least it would be very different for me. Proximity is less important in some ways, but not in all the important ways.
Yeah, if you lived next door to me you wouldn’t even know my name, real or online! I lived in a nice middle class neighborhood for seven years. At the end of that time I STILL didn’t know any of my neighbors names. I live in a poor neighborhood now, for a little more than a year, and I know more about several neighbors here than I ever did down there. (Poor black people and poor Puerto Ricans are more gregarious than middle class Puerto Ricans, middle class whites, middle class blacks and middle class Japanese. I knew more about my Japanese neighbor from her appearance in the local paper than I did from speking to her or to her children.)
But the jokers that read this site, and Annie Gottlieb’s site, know a helluva lot more about me than my neighbors. For that matter, Annie and another friend online probably know more about what’s going on in my life than almost all of my other friends, most of whom live here in O-town.
Trust me, if you lived next door to me you just wouldn’t know shit about me, I wouldn’t know shit about you, and we’d both be perfectly happy with that arrangement.
Online communication is a two-edge sword in my opinion and it can’t make up for human face-to-face interaction.
Right. There’s a distinct lack of the ability to punch the other jackass in the mouth online.
Regarding hot Colombians: do you watch Modern Family?
No. I’m mostly done with sit-coms. The only exceptions are “The Office” (American version – the British version is just far too nasty for my taste) and sometimes “Up All Night”, because my wife and I can relate. (Plus we both just love Christina Applegate.)
But I know of the hot Colombian of which you speak. I also worked with a guy who had married a hot Colombian. There is a small Colombian community here in Orlando, for some reason, and they stick together although they willing marry outsiders. Actually, a male Colombian doctor put my leg back together in 1988, so I’m found of Colombians in general for that reason. (Also for making Florida more interesting in the 1970s and 1980s.)
willingLY, willingLY.
We’re the same way. We actively avoid getting to know people. Didn’t know either set of neighbors in Irvine, don’t know my neighbor to my left now, know the guy to my right only because he’s my landlord. We’re more urban “apartment folk” by inclination: so long as you don’t take my parking space we have no need to be acquainted. And when we do get to know people its never our idea.
For those who don’t know the Colombian in question:
http://www.popcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/sofia_vergara.jpeg
So they need all that cocaine to cope with women like that?
Steve
The Tea Partiers are angry at elites for leaving them behind: the sexual revolution, the rights revolutions, greater freedom of expression, secularism, urbanization, etc…
The Occupy generation can’t believe the elites are still trapped in what look to them like ancient paradigms — parties, churches, generations, races, classes.
isn’t it Aerosmith who has the song “Dream On?”
Isn’t Aerosmith the band whose lead singer is now a judge on American Idol?
So they need all that cocaine to cope with women like that?
Please. They need all that cocaine to support American nose-candy habits. Only idiots would turn their noses up (so to speak) at that kind of export market. Remember, exports are the key to a healthy economy!
WTF, Giants’ D? WTF?
Ok, I guess Icepick and Michael are antisocial curmudgeons, except on the internet.
As mentioned before, I just moved to Florida and don’t really know my neighbors yet. But in Ohio I was part of a great little community on our street – we were four families that looked after each other. One watched our oldest kids while my wife gave birth to our third. I would walk everyone’s kids to school in the morning. 2-3 evenings a week we’d BS in street while the kids played when the weather was nice. If something happened we knew we had people close at hand that we could rely on. Playing chess with some stranger in Asia ain’t the same thing, not that isn’t cool, valuable and rewarding. I’m not against virtual communities, but IMO they can’t replace non-virtual communities.
Playing chess with some stranger in Asia ain’t the same thing….
No, it’s better because I don’t have to worry about whether or not the guy in Asia mows his lawn more or less frequently than I do, nor do I have to listen to the fights that guy has with his wife, nor worry about which house that smell of pot is coming form (and wonder whether or not the police are going to show up and raid the place), nor argue with him about his damned dog shitting in my yard, etc, etc. That guy can’t watch my kids for me, true. But I missing not just positives there, but almost all the negatives.
And I’ll state that you’re looking at it from the perspective of having nice neighbors. Not all neighbors are good, not even in good neighborhoods.
Ok, I guess Icepick and Michael are antisocial curmudgeons, except on the internet.
Except? Are you fucking kidding me?
I was going to write something extensive about the Los Angeles of the 40s and 50s when I went I went to school there, but realized I couldn’t really do any justice to it. Suffice to say that nearly everything folks have said upthread about the Midwest and East were untrue of Los Angeles — well, both true and untrue — but what the hell, it’s Los Angeles. Example: I went to schools were kids — of every hue — routinely referred to their classmates as Paddys, Spooks, Beaners, and Buddhaheads….
Good neighbors and good neighborhoods are made; they don’t fall from the sky.
And you seem to be looking at it from the perspective of having nothing but shitty neighbors. Of course not all neighbors are good. Never said they were. In my experience of living in about 10 different places over the last 20 years, I’d say it varies. I’ve lived in “nice” neighborhoods with shitty neighbors. One of the best neighborhoods I lived in (and by best I mean it had great neighbors) was one with significant prostitution, drug and petty crime problems. The worst neighborhood I lived in was one of those cookie-cutter subdivisions where every house looked alike and everyone spent 95% of their time holed up in their “castle.” On paper it was a “great” neighborhood but there was no sense of community which for me made it a sterile, soulless place to live. But it sounds like you’d feel right at home in a place like that. Different strokes….
Personally, for me it’s the people that make the neighborhood.
Personally, for me it’s the people that make the neighborhood.
You’re assuming a lot. I don’t think the nighbors who didn’t know my name were bad – they were just distant. That ain’t all bad, not at all.
Let’s see, my current neighborhood, which also happens to occupy the same space as the neighborhood I grew up in (same buildings, too, but all different people, except for me and one old friend’s family), has actually improved in the last four years. But we still have drug dealers, and dog fighters, and all manner of perverts (the kind that go to jail for doing nasty things to little children and little old ladies, not the kind that make you think “Kinky!” – they get let out of jail later and then they move here), and other assorted riff-raff. The neighbor on one side of me sat idly be why three armed men rummaged through my Mom’s house for an hour to an hour and a half almost four years ago – with my Mom and brother inside. A call to the police would have been nice. The neighbor on the other side occassionally has the police show up to ask him questions. The first thing they do is have him lift up his shirt and turn around, so they can see what kind of gang he belongs to. (Tats are wonderful police tools – they’re frequently signs that state, “Look at me, I’m a felon and a dumbass!”) At one point he disappeared for several months. I’m presuming he was cooling his heels in some jail or another, but who knows? The couple that live behind us are nice – all they do is fight and scream at each other at the tops of their lungs. Some day he’s going to get tired of listening to her scream – even money on whether he puts her in the hospital or just disappears.
Other luminaries of this neighborhood include a former head of the Haitian secret police (he drove a bus for Disney, of all things, and lived right around the corner from where I type this) and the first American citizen ever convicted of crimes against humanity. (HERE is where he formed his character. But hey, he got turned into a character in a Nick Cage movie, so it’s all good!)
Yes, the people make the neighborhood. This neighborhood makes me yearn for the nice, quiet, cookie-cutter middle class neighborhood where no one knows my name. None of them noticed our house getting burglarized in the middle of the day, but at least none of them were (a) the robbers or (b) cheering them on. Believe me, if you were living next to me you wouldn’t care about my problems even if I made the effort to tell them to you. You’d probably be shitting your pants at every loud noise in the middle of the night, LOL! Hell, I’m starting to get that tight knot in my stomach again just remembering all this stuff!
But for the record, this neighborhood is MUCH more friendly than the old one. The kids all know me because of my cat problem (long story, not going to tell it) and a lot of the adults know me because – well, because they actually are greagarious folk and they WANT to speak to their neighbors! Plus, I put out good stuff for them to rummage. Friendliness and gregariousness are WAY the fuck over-rated.
Good neighbors and good neighborhoods are made; they don’t fall from the sky.
Bad neighbors and bad neighborhoods don’t fall from the sky either. Pine Hills has gone from a pleasant place to bring up a family to this wretched state due to a variety of factors.
First, the constant influx of people to Central Florida in my lifetime means new neighborhoods were, in fact still ARE, always being built. At some point people realized they could keep moving up because property values kept going up. (Doh!) So the old-timers started moving into new neighborhoods.
Then the government, in its infinite bi-partisan wisdom, decided that not enough poor minorities who couldn’t afford a stand-alone housing needed to own stand-alone houses they couldn’t afford. So they started making it possible for poor people (of color, usually, as the government just doesn’t give much of a shit about poor white people, or Bithlo would have clean drinking water – as Bithlo acquires a greater variety of hues I expect them to FINALLY get hooked into the county water supply) to move into nicer neighborhoods. The results were predictable.
Third, Pine Hills got an extra-special FUCK YOU from the Clintons, who thought importing a bunch of the people that fucked up Haiti into the United States would be a good idea, and Pine Hills got more than its fair share. (I really suspect it was just pay-back. Most people don’t realize how Arkansas got fucked over by the Mariel boat lift back in the day. Guess who was governor of Arkansas back then? Guess who lost his re-election bid because of rioting Cubans? (Insert sandwich joke HERE.) Florida was due for a good fucking by President Bill, and Pine Hills is just one of the lucky places that bore the brunt of it.)\
Ain’t no amount of good hard work by the good people of Pine Hills (and there are many, and they are trying despite the best efforts of the larger community’s leadership – I do not count myself among their number BTW) will undo the mess made here. The only way to fix the place up would be to gentrify it – i.e. to replace a good many of the people that live here. And for reasons that aren’t worth going into here that just isn’t going to happen.
One final thing: if you want COMMUNITY there needs to be similar interests among the residents and buy-in. People who move in and out all the time are going to give you none of that. (Andy, you’re fucking up every good neighborhood you move into, because you’re going to move outof in short order.) Nor will having a bunch of people crammed together by circumstance who otherwise have no common interests.