I came to the big city relatively late in life. Cities seems to
me places suited entirely for the young. Their so-called charms —
quirkiness, edginess, anonymity, diversity — are in the main young
people’s delights. Older folks don’t want edginess. We want quiet,
order, discipline. We want clean streets.
We want small towns.
My “enlightened” city friends, many of whom hail from
Midwestern hamlets and villages, have few good things to say about
small towns or their residents, whom they regard as homophobic,
narrow-minded yokels, defined primarily by their very backwardness.
President Obama, a smug Chicago resident, echoed this elitist
sentiment perfectly when he accused small-towner Midwesterners of
bitterly clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who
aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade
sentiment.”
I am obviously not familiar with all small towns, but I
have lived in a dozen or more villages in my lifetime, from Eldon,
Missouri (population 4,895) to Chester, Illinois
(8,400). Never did I own a firearm nor was I much
preoccupied with religious beliefs (though I have considered taking
up both since I moved to the big city). I certainly don’t recall
much bitterness among my small-town neighbors. In fact, I have
always found the people of the backroads and small towns have more
love of their country and their fellow human beings than
suburbanites and city folks combined.
Not long ago I attended a city council meeting in a
central Illinois town of 10,000 people. Midway through the meeting
an elderly lady stood and addressed the eminent council members.
The folks living across the street from her, she complained, kept
their trash cans out front all week long. It was a disgrace. She
wanted the council to do something about it. The councilmen
exchanged uneasy glances. At length the mayor said, “I’ll talk to
them, Blanche.” And I’ll bet he did.
Busybody? Petty? Maybe. But I was rooting for
her. To my mind it has always been the Blanches of this world that
have maintained order, discipline, and good morals in a community.
In contrast, on my city street there is garbage ankle-deep from one
end to the other. My apathetic neighbors consider it entirely
appropriate to finish a can of beer or a bag of burgers and toss
the waste in the middle of the street or (more likely) in my front
yard. The alleys are often impassable due to the volume of trash
dumped both legally and illegally. What I wouldn’t give for a few
Blanches on my block.
Another time, when the company that collected the town’s
refuse suddenly went bust, this same mayor (who also happened to be
the commander of the local VFW Post) jumped in his pickup and
dutifully hauled away the elderly’s trash. When was the last time
you saw your suburban or big city mayor do that?
WHEN I WAS A young man, small towns were still places
where manners, morals, and good behavior were strictly enforced,
where people were harshly judged by their neighbors, and where
“everybody knew everything about everybody else.” In those days if
a man did the wrong thing, if he was a drunkard, if he took up with
another man’s wife, if he refused to work, he was ostracized by the
entire community. He was made to feel a sense of shame and guilt.
Maybe he would reform or maybe he would pack up and slink off to
the city where such ill behavior was tolerated and judgment was
reserved. Fear of ostracization and the community’s judgment kept
the vast majority of people on the straight and narrow, and this
allowed society to function smoothly and civilization to
advance.
Sentimentalists, of course, considered such things cruel
and unenlightened. It was wrong to judge others, regardless of what
they have done. Worse, sometimes the innocent children of that
drunkard or the bastard child of some unmarried girl were
ostracized too. There was only one remedy for this: judgment, shame
and guilt had to be eradicated completely. Better an entire society
slide into decadence than one innocent child suffer.
This, quite naturally, opened the floodgates for all
manner of pathological behavior. The result of this “anything goes”
mentality has been sky-high divorce rates, rocketing out-of-wedlock
births, countless one-parent families, the methamphetamine epidemic, and all of the other
attendant pathologies. Sentimentality’s triumph has been small town
America’s downfall.
But not completely. I suspect sentimentality may have had
its day. From what I have seen “anything goes” is on its way out.
People are rethinking the wisdom of withholding judgment. Maybe a
good healthy dose ostracization is just what this country
needs.
