Posted on 03/09/2019 2:15:57 AM PST by vannrox
Do you know your place? In these days of hysterical Wokesterism, the question would surely provoke a riot of cowbell-clanging Antifa cadres, fainting spells in the congressional black caucus, and gravely equivocal op-eds from David Brooks of The New York Times. Yet it’s a central, unacknowledged quandary of our time that so many Americans have no place and suffer terribly from it.
Human beings need a place in the social order, in the economic order, and in actual geography in order to function optimally in a life fraught with the normal challenges and difficulties that reality presents.
Let’s take these places in reverse order...
It’s a fact that most Americans live in everyday environments that are, at best, not worth caring about, and at worst actively punishing to human neurology. Have you taken a good look at the American landscape and townscape lately? How do you feel venturing down the six-lane commercial boulevards lined with cartoon architecture? Either anxious or numb, would be my guess. Or a Main Street of empty storefronts? Or an avenue of looming, despotic glass skyscrapers? Or a vast subdivision of identical McHouses where the buffalo once roamed? Is it any wonder that Americans require more antidepressant medication than people in other lands? Or, that failing to find treatment, they self-medicate with alcohol, opiates, sugary snacks, and anything else that takes them out of the soul-crushing reality of their surroundings.
I don’t think you can overstate the damage we’ve done to ourselves in the sheer material arrangement of our national life. A decade ago, I sat in on many zoning board meetings called to approve new WalMarts and other chain-stores around my region of upstate New York and southern Vermont. Inevitably, the companies organized a claque of locals in the meeting hall — itself a depressing, low-ceilinged chamber of cinder blocks and fluorescent lighting — to fill the seats and yell in support of “bargain shopping.”
That was some bargain they got. The chain-stores got approved and the Main Streets died, but that wasn’t the end of it. This dynamic also destroyed networks that gave local citizens an economic and social place. Locally owned business people were the caretakers of the town. They took care of two buildings — their place of business and their home. They sat on library, school, and hospital boards and donated money to running local institutions. They employed people who lived in town and there were consequences for treating them well or badly. There was even a time in this country when local business people wouldn’t dare to put up an insultingly ugly building.
A lot of this economic behavior has produced the social perversities of our time. Exterminating an entire class of local merchants has eliminated the heart of the American middle-class and grotesquely concentrated the nation’s wealth among corporate leviathans who comprise one percent of the population. It also eliminated the place where young people learned how to do business, preparing themselves to try ventures of their own, and to make a place for themselves in the world.
What is your place now? A cubicle in the marketing department of Old Navy? An aisle in the Home Depot? A desk in the Diversity and Inclusion office of some State University, pushing to sort the student population into racial and sexual categories because all other ways of belonging in society are gone? Or do you occupy ten square feet of sidewalk with a tarp and a shopping cart? None of those places are liable to furnish a personal sense that life is worth living.
Those of you out there still sincerely clamoring for “change” might start asking yourselves if you have a clue about finding a place worth caring about in this country and what it might actually take to get there, including the revision of a lot of ideas in your head that you take for granted. Hint: if you’re looking for it in the current political leadership you are probably wasting your time and energy. If you’re looking for it in some group identity, you may not ever discover the power in your own individual ability to make choices for yourself.
What is your place now? A cubicle in the marketing department of Old Navy? An aisle in the Home Depot? A desk in the Diversity and Inclusion office of some State University, pushing to sort the student population into racial and sexual categories because all other ways of belonging in society are gone? Or do you occupy ten square feet of sidewalk with a tarp and a shopping cart? None of those places are liable to furnish a personal sense that life is worth living.
Change, my friend. And I have but one word for the future Amazon. People will never even venture from their homes.
Trying hard to hawk his books?
Our country is run by dingbats. Kunstler is one of them.
competition. Keep up or shut down. Stop the whining.
Soon Walmart will be replaced by the internet and those small business owners will be selling to you via the web.Its already happening big time.
Kunstler’s dingbat faux wailing is the noise of a dingbat who doesn’t even know whats happening.
Listen to the video at the end of my post.
You already see that trend as shopping malls (I should say “former shopping malls”) are increasingly geared towards food and entertainment as opposed to actual purchasing of goods. Years ago one of our dying malls here in northern NJ had a tattoo parlor open in one of its empty storefronts; it really is the natural progression of things.
Shopping online is simply more efficient; you can almost always find the size and color your want in clothing, for example. Also, footage of ferals wilding has ensured many people will never expose themselves to that danger by voluntarily putting themselves at risk.
I’ve been doing a fair amount of genealogical research this winter and have dug deeply into the lives of people in small towns in Idaho and southeastern BC 125 to 75 years ago.I have been struck by the sheer number of social events, church events, reporting cf what every kid is doing in school, who has come to visit who, which businessman is staying at the local hotel, who won what at various fairs, birth and death celebrations. The early phone directories give a very good picture of the Main Street businesses all owned and run by your neighbors. People had real love for their local “mercantile” stores.
Wealth was not great in those days and life was quite hard and very physical. But a sense of the rhythm of life and contentment shines through.
Yes, “progress” is inevitable, but the author is correct that the structure, ownership, and design of modern businesses, roads, and communities can be soul-robbing and stultifying. He should have also added the smothering nature of everybody having to bow before the Great God in far away Washington DC and its insatiable appetite for our money. That is probably equally devastating to communities as anything else.
“Kunstler’s dingbat faux wailing is the noise of a dingbat who doesn’t even know whats happening.”
Although I find some of the modern urban and suburban designs from not meeting my tastes to ugly, I stopped reading when he did not inject how demokraps in government, academia, and eventually media and now corporate positions over the past 50+ years have caused much of and are responsible for most of what he complains. He not only doesn’t know what is happening, he doesn’t know why it happened.
The “Shopping Mall” was an extension of Main Street. Among the chain stores were local entrepreneurs who opened boutiques that sold the things that were not available in the chains.
What happened to the “Malls” was the bus lines that brought the Free Shit Army and riff-raff to the malls. The resultant crime wave inside and outside drove many customers to shop Amazon and other web-enabled merchants to avoid the crime and miscreants.
I can have it delivered in two days, and not have to deal with the FSA, etc. sealed their fate.
As for Main Street against Walmart, wherever a Walmart is built, there are other businesses that spring up around them almost instantly. Main Street as a location simply could not accommodate the numbers of people. Walmart as a store is incompatible with a “center of town” destination. F.W. Woolworth was the precursor to Walmart and simply couldn’t compete as a “center of town” location because of the small store size and accessibility to patrons.
So, the center of town was shifted to a new “center of town”.
Having a job gives a great sense of self worth and I’m sure walmart created more jobs than it took.
We are a capitalist country.
I’m sure the same tears were cried when Sears, Kmart and Macy’s opened.
It is what it is.
Reading Give Me Liberty: Freeing Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century
by Gerry. Spence
so far I am just a slave. In a country that is freer than most
The bus lines weren’t just to bring shoppers; they were bringing many of the low-wage workers as well.
Wal-Mart is Amazon for people that want to try something on/measure it against something, etc.; both are the natural evolution of shopping. Amazon was also pushed by the fact that in increasing areas of this country, you’ll have nothing in common with people jabbering in foreign tongues when you step outside your home. There is no reason to be physically in a store after 9 am; it is downright depressing.
THX1138
Republicans off shored our economy when they went global. Now we are ripe for the taking. China will be the dominant force in the world soon. Thanks Republicans and Free Traitors™. Thanks for nothing.
The Democrat socialist malaise was the SECONDARY infection.
Luddite drivel
Mainstreet is gone because it is obsolete. Walmart eliminated steps between maker and buyer that by organization were no longer essential. ditto home depot, lowes etc
What is to me amazing is that used car dealers are under threat. Carvana runs ads where a young woman in bed, eating bon bons, uses her phone to find and then buy a car. The car is delivered to her home on a roll back. They apparently will buy and pick up her old car.
And then there is Amazon. No mom and pop storefront or for that matter Woolworth could stand up to the cost pressure of Amazon or any other online mega vendor
Then there are malls........ another story of obselescence in process
It’s predator globalists like you that wonder why the USA is going socialist. It is a sign of a mental deficiency, that is how I explain Free Traitors™ ignorance...
“Luddite drivel”
Agree!
Not exonerating the lefty Republicans from their responsibility. My recent reading of early 1900 US history shows globalism belonged in both parties. The average citizen did not want to be entangled in international issues even then. WWI and WW2 greatly advanced US globalism. That being said, the decay and fleeing of inner cities and empty store fronts started to occur well before the 1980s commercial globalism acceleration, and it wasn’t the average GOP politician running those places.
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