The Heedless People Who Didnt Care About Michael Oher - Road to the Middle Class

BACK IN THE 1920s heedless rich writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald used to write novels about the heedless rich. They went on their heedless way, these rich WASPs like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, wrecking the lives of poor slobs like auto mechanic Mr. Wilson and his wife Myrtle. Nothing ever touched them. Someone else always took the fall, perhaps the too-eager, too-Jewish Jay Gatsby, nÃƒÂ© Gatz. It was their money, their old money, that freed the WASPs from accountability.

The WASPs, for their sins, had the misfortune of having their heedlessness memorialized in bestselling novels, dozens of them.

Today, of course, things are very different. No WASP would think of heedlessness today, not for a moment. Your old-stock New England WASP has become careful and prudent. And your lower-class white Protestant church-goer is less than a generation away from redneck heedlessness.

But never fear. Today we have what we might call the “New Heedlessness.” You know what I mean.

As the party of heedlessness, the Democrats have forgotten all the proud talk about the rational social science that would end poverty and injustice. Now they say: If you don’t give us the money you don’t care about kids.

Last week, two commentators discussed the New Heedlessness as they surveyed the political scene at the end of 2006. In Britain, the American columnist Janet Daley reviewed the Conservative Party’s policy report “Breakdown Britain.” It is a shocking rehearsal of the failures of New Labour’s welfare state.

But Daley was not impressed. We know all this stuff, she complained. Why do we need yet another report to tell us that the welfare state has multiplied social pathology out of mind?

In the United States Rich Lowry was not impressed either. His problem was presidential candidate John Edwards and his policy proposals for growing the middle class. Wrote Lowry:

Edwards’ anti-poverty proposals aren’t compelling because they fail to acknowledge a basic truth: It is impossible “to grow the middle class,” as he puts it, without spreading middle-class values. Edwards famously talks of “two Americas.”

Indeed. One America is the one where women get married and then have babies and the other America is where they just have babies. The big middle-class value that Edwards doesn’t really seem to want to speak out loud is the tabooed “M-word that rhymes with carriage.”

There is big trouble in the Other America because after a generation of heedlessness you get a lot of kids running around homelessÃ¢â‚¬â€in spirit if not in fact. Many of these kids, as Janet Daley points out, “lack what were once considered to be the basic provisions of family life: two parents, [and] a sense of belonging to a stable household (even if it was poor).”

These neglected children are kids like Michael Oher, who turned up recently in The New York Times in Michael Lewis’s “Ballad of Big Mike.” Of kids like Michael you can too often write:

that Michael’s father had been shot and killed and tossed off a bridge, that his mother was addicted to crack cocaine and that his life experience was so narrow that he might as well have spent his first 16 years inside a closet... Big Mike, as he was called, was essentially homeless and so had made an art of sleeping on whatever floor the ghetto would provide for him.

Yes, read the whole thing. It’s a compelling story, and for you sophisticated ironists there is even irony in it.

African American Michael Oher is doing fine now as a stand out left offensive tackle at Ole Miss thanks to a bunch of rich white conservatives at a Christian school in the Old South.

But why should we continue spending five percent of GDP every year on government schooling and $200 billion a year on welfare when a nice kid like Michael Oher completely falls through the safety net? What combination of personal and institutional heedlessness does it take to produce a 16-year-old like Michael Oher, utterly unschooled and utterly unsocialized? How many more are there like him? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?

It would be interesting to apply the “Enron Test” to the case of Michael Oher and the other victims of the welfare state. Suppose that Michael Oher had been neglected not by his mother, the local government child services bureaucracy, and the local school bureaucracy but by the late Ken Lay and the evil Enron corporation. What would our Democratic friends say then?

For the heedless bureaucrats of the welfare state it’s not the money. It’s power that frees them from accountability.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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