Upside down and inside out: Craige McMillan finds poverty caused by wrong values

WorldNetDaily.com ^ | Thursday, March 21, 2002 | Craige McMillan

[JohnHuang2]

"The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong."

So begins the opening essay, "The Knife Went In," in a remarkable book titled "Life at the Bottom: The worldview that makes the underclass," by Theodore Dalrymple (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2001). If you want to understand why our culture is upside down – and you want a picture of what it will look like when we reach our collective destination, this is the book for you.

Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of a British physician and psychiatrist. His years of working with the poor in British slums and African villages have led him to conclude that "long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values." Dr. Dalrymple's collection of essays will take you down his path of discovery. It is a journey you will long remember, often with a shudder, for it is a journey into Britain and America's collective future, unless we turn from the abyss.

Perhaps it is the sheer number of stories from the lives of real people, often told in bits of their own words, that makes this book such riveting reading. Here you will meet murderers who describe their sentences as bad luck, and assure the good doctor that it was the victim's fault, "for being present." You will meet habitual church burglars who rob and torch their way through life not because they "were dragged as a child to tedious services by hypocritical parents," but because "in general, churches were poorly secured, easy to break into, and contained valuable objects in silver." Ultimately the fault lies with church authorities, as the police will attest, because they "should have known of [the criminal's] proclivities and taken the necessary measures to prevent him from acting upon them." Politically correct law enforcement has arrived.

From the prison we move onto the suicide wards in a hospital, where the doctor finds a young West Indian woman, one of six new patients that day. She took an overdose "after her ex-boyfriend, aged 19, punched her."

"'Why did he do that?' I ask.

"'I phoned him,' she replies. 'He said he'd told me already he didn't want me to phone him no more.'

"'So he came round and hit you?'

"'Yes.'

"'Does he hit you often?'

"'No,' she replies. 'Usually he head-butts me.'"

Dr. Dalrymple's insights into domestic violence are frightening in their clarity. But by now, he has us further down the path he has already traveled, and next we see the underclass' penchant for constant entertainment:

To reach Saturday night is the summit of ambition of much of English youth ... almost no one over 30 is to be seen on the streets. It is as if a devastating epidemic had swept over the country and left alive no one who has reached middle age ... I recall a recent patient of mine, her eyesight permanently damaged by a group of girls in a club who glassed her (that is to say, broke some glasses and pushed the jagged edges into her face and neck) because she looked for too long and with too intense an interest at the boyfriend of one of her assailants.

At the hospital he has a conversation with "a 16-year-old girl who has taken an overdose to force the local authorities to give her an apartment. Such apartments are allocated on the basis of need and vulnerability, and a young girl who attempts suicide could hardly stand in greater need of help. She hates her mother because they argue all the time, and she has left home to live on the street. She doesn't know who her father is, and she doesn't care. She hated school, of course, and left sooner than the law allowed – not that the law cares much.

"'What are your interests?' I ask. She doesn't know what I mean, and pouts. I rephrase the question.

"'What are you interested in?' She still doesn't know what I mean. All the same, she is of good intelligence – very good, in fact.

"'What do you like doing?'

"'Going out.'

"'Where to?'

"'Clubs. Everything else is s---.'"

How could generations of a tax system designed to redistribute wealth more equitably result in such poverty of mind and spirit?

[JohnHuang2]

Thursday, March 21, 2002

Quote of the Day by goldstategop

[amstaff1]

Reminds me of the old debate, "Which came first,the chicken or the egg"? Are poor people the way they are (downtrodden,culturally deprived, you pick the word} because they're poor? Or are they poor because of the way they are. The answer in most cases is pretty obvious but not very politically correct.