Living in Realville.

Rush liked to say he lived in Realville. Brian has an interesting post about moving there. Common sense strikes again.

When I arrived in college, I was surrounded by more liberals and liberal teachers. I didn't need the additional indoctrination. I arrived there pre-packaged.

So I began the working years of my life with an environmental protection lean and little else. I had been raised Catholic/Lutheran, I had plenty of guns, I thought the evil rich guys all voted Republican. I voted every four years like clockwork. Then a series of events woke me up and changed my mind about liberals and democrats forever. . . .^[1]

His thoughts on people living in subsidized housing are right on the money. "Our culture doesn't have a solution for the people who live there," he observes. We can't bring ourselves to recognize that and so twist ourselves into knots trying to square the circle and solve problems that can't be solved. Mental illness, drugs, and alcohol play their part.

Too, it's my belief that industrial, highly urbanized life is basically inhuman where there is little community and simple labor is not enough to allow one to thrive. Religion and Christian community are reviled and the culture in general is putrid, a waste of time for people needing spiritual or emotional sustenance. The despair of urban life seems to be the essence of modern life but millions of us live in cities and it's just assumed that this is some kind of ultimate brass ring in man's progress to the stars.

I'm not a sour puss and have what I think are minimal social skills but I remember living in a townhouse community and going to a nearby restaurant for dinner one Saturday. I looked around that crowded restaurant no more than a quarter mile from my home as the crow flies and it struck me that after eight years there I didn't know one person in the restaurant. Same with any other establishment in that area. I had a pleasant relationship with one next door neighbor and that was it.

Any other social contact I had was at work and from what I developed elsewhere with considerable effort, invariably requiring driving many miles to enjoy. Without such effort it's easy to live a grey life. I met a Scots fellow in London back in 1962 and he told me he'd lived in London for 25 years but had not one friend.

All told high-density urban life seems like a formula for despair unless you work really hard to do something about it. It's no wonder that the holes in men's souls end up being filled with political hopes and dependencies. Political opportunists long ago learned to appeal to this hunger in people to advance their own fortunes. But as Samuel Johnson wrote centuries ago:

How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.
Still to ourselves in every place consign'd,
Our own felicity we make or find.

Take that to heart and voila you're a conservative.

Notes
^[1] "How I Became a Conservative." By Brian, The New and Improved- Frankenstein Government, 3/11/21.