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, né 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 homeless—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 www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

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”

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

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

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

mysql close