It is a familiar sight here in the inner-city: young men in the
prime of life aimlessly hanging out on stoops at midday, smoking
and listening to hip hop music.
Government statistics tell only half of the story. One in five
American men does not work. It is worse in my hometown of St. Louis
where the jobless rate for black men without a high school diploma
reached 26 percent last year, and half of all students fail to
graduate public high school. Needless to say, that is a lot of
young men with nothing to do.
Many of these young layabouts find it unnecessary to work, save
on those rare occasions when they need to make a fast buck. Unlike
the middle-class suburbs or working class neighborhoods, it takes
very few resources to get by in the ghetto. “You would be amazed at
the number of persons you can cram into a small non-air-conditioned
rental unit,” a social worker friend tells me. Their expenses
amount to little more than the clothes on their backs, bus tickets,
cell phones and cigarettes. This easily can be earned by strolling
down to the Temporary Labor Agency and putting in an honest day’s
work chopping ice or stacking brick, which leaves one free for the
rest of the week. Others make a few bucks peddling dope or stealing
pipe (a spray-painted sign on a nearby boarded-up building informs
would-be thieves that they have already removed all the copper). A
few ask for handouts. Many collect Supplemental Security Insurance
for real or imagined disabilities.
Even if these aimless youth wanted to work, numerous factors
militate against it. Foremost is the lack of good-paying, low-skill
manufacturing jobs, the type of work that makes getting off the
stoop worthwhile. Today’s big cities are overwhelmingly centers for
the financial, legal, and medical service industries. Not exactly
prime job hunting territory for young men with zero job skills.
True, there are plenty of McJobs for girls, and roofing and
lawncare jobs, though employers understandably prefer to hire
reliable, undemanding, and hard-working migrant workers.
Child support payments are another popular excuse to avoid work.
Many do-nothings are fathers — which means they can do at least
one thing well — and see little profit in roasting 40-hours a week
on a tar roof only to see their wages go to child support.
(Responsibility to their offspring comes in a distant third or
fourth.) Others will work until the Bureaucracy catches up with
them and begins garnishing their wages.
Moreover, a good percentage of these stoop jockeys are all but
unemployable, either because they cannot pass a simple drug test or
because of extensive prison records. A surprising number have
outstanding warrants; it is hard to keep a job when you are
constantly being locked up for this or that drug or traffic
offense.
THE OTHER HALF OF the story is that such aimlessness and lack of
purpose has become a major cause of the social disorder plaguing
our inner-cities. “Work,” said Voltaire, “spares us from three
evils: boredom, vice, and need.” But work has other positive
effects beyond promoting healthy, livable cities. Work is an
important cog in the socializing process, as it teaches one to get
along with men and women of diverse ages, races, and social
classes. Workers learn to take orders from people they would
ordinarily want to punch in the mouth. Workers learn to control
their temper and to modify their behavior and their language. Work
instills discipline, self-sufficiency, and self-respect (as opposed
to self-esteem). Work builds character. Without meaningful work we
see that corruption of character the communitarian essayist Wendell
Berry pegged as the source of the “corruption of community.” What
is more, men who work to support a family enjoy the dignity and
satisfaction of doing one’s duty and living for others. You may
even feel like you are contributing to society, and that you are
part of a larger community, though this may be stretching it.
It is all of a piece. A thriving, livable city is one filled
with responsible working men. An urban hellhole, conversely, is
littered with aimless do-nothings. Our politicians can gab all they
want about creating jobs, but in our cities that is putting the
cart before the horse. First we have to do what their fathers
should have done: teach our aimless youth the value of hard work.
In other words, we have to start from scratch.
