Reading Hedges - Principle or profit? What's destroying our cities?

Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco’s book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is a book about what they call “sacrifice zones”, those areas of the United States which corporate capitalism out of control has destroyed. The first chapter described the problems for the Native Americans on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. The second chapter describes Camden, New Jersey, the poorest city in the United States.

Hedges writes “Once communities break down physically, they bread down morally.” P.69 and I was struck with the analogy to Brockport where we have witnessed our family oriented neighborhoods taken over by slumlords who have turned the housing stock into student rental and allowed the buildings to deteriorate and watched the crime rate escalate fueled by adolescent hormones and alcohol. The demand for public safety services has increased in these neighborhoods with constant calls for service for disorderly conduct, vandalism, thefts, rapes, and this year even a murder on the campus.

There have been calls by the slumlords for Village dissolution and they have been especially critical of the police department wanting it dissolved. Here is what Hedges writes on page 70 about what happened in Camden:

“Camden is a dead city. It makes and produces nothing. It is the poorest city in the United States and is usually ranked as one of the most, and often the most, dangerous. In early 2011 nearly half of the city’s police force, one hundred and sixty-eight officers, were laid off because of a $26 million budget shortfall. By the end of 2011, although more than one hundred officers had been rehired, homicides had climbed by thirty percent and burglaries by more than forty percent from the previous year.”

On page 76, Hedges writes, “The city spends seventy-five percent of its budget on the police and fire departments, a harbinger of the corporate state where only the security apparatus is maintained. The main branch of the city’s library has been shut down due to lack of funds.”

Again in Brockport, the complaint that almost half of its budget goes for the police department which is needed because of the high concentration of non home owning transients who live densely packed into the Village core. The Village has maintained its contribution to the library which was moved out of the Village into the Town of Clarkson.

At the end of this chapter, Hedges interviews Fr. Michael Doyle, the Pastor of Sacred Heart Catholic church, who, in his 70s now, has been at Sacred Heart since 1974. Fr. Doyle describes the anger that like toxic poison destroys Camden’s young people who are 95% people of color. Fr. Doyle is quoted as saying,

“And so that’s, I think I see violence – I’m not talking about violence on TV, which might be a violent show – but I’m talking about the violence that rises out of the marketing that shows the kid what he could have, creates a huge anger that explodes, easily. That I discovered very quickly when I came to Camden. I discovered the anger was so near the surface, you just rub it and it explodes. And there’s no respect for you if you have no money. I think the constant assault of the marketers, never-ending, it’s building up an anger that’s - you can understand it, but it’s so violent.” P.110

What Fr. Doyle seems to be saying is that it is not the poverty itself that is so much of the problem as the disparity between the haves and the have nots. It is the income inequality which is driving the violence in Camden and in other places in the United States.

We have seen this inequality in Brockport between the Village and the Towns. Village residents pay more taxes than people living in the Towns to provide services for a much more dense population in the Village and which the people in the Towns benefit from just as well. In 2010 the Towns voted to change their ambulance contracts from the Brockport Volunteer Ambulance Corps to Monroe Ambulance, a profit making company based in Rochester, in an attempt to “starve the beast” as one leader in the fire department told me to force the Village to cooperate with a fire district. The attempt was ultimately successful and a fire district was created which in its first year of operation has raised fire protection rates 41%. This additional burden will affect Village residents much more severely because they already pay higher taxes than those who live in the towns.

Hedges further quotes Fr. Doyle who says,

“I grew up in Ireland and we had the songs of our struggle, and it was clear against whom  we were struggling. The enemy was clear. I was saying about Ireland, that it’s nosediving now at an enormous rate. And I was saying before it was nosediving, that we have an enemy and we don’t know it’s an enemy. It’s the money crowd. It’s an enemy. But people don’t see it as an enemy. And you can’t challenge it because you don’t see it. And I think it’s the same way for the young people here. You have an enemy, and that enemy is greed and prejudice and injustice and all that type of thing, but you can’t get at it. There’s no head, there’s no clarity, so you take it out on your neighbor, it’s just horrendous what people do.” P.111

The enemy is the capitalistic system which seeks only profit and nothing else matters. Human well being and safety, a sense of belonging, and self worth are not quantifiable on the profit sheet and we have decided that people are to be sacrificed for money. Money is our national God and so when Americans tell you its not the money it’s the principle of the thing, you can bet your last buck they are lying, it’s the money.

Brockport is not Camden, NY, but the slumlords have tried to turn it into a Camden by extracting as much profit as possible from its housing stock destroying neighborhoods and communities in the process. When building codes were put in place and were enforced there was an effort to dissolve the very government which provided any over sight and constraint on this greed. These forces almost destroyed the Village. But Brockport is small enough that the enemies could be identified. They are a handful of slumlords and their backers who would take over the Village for their personal profit.

The point is not that there are bad people as much as we have created a bad system where money has become more important than other human values. The question that begs to be answered is “in the end what really matters?” This is a spiritual question. It is one about values. What matters the most to you, to us as a nation? What kind of a person do I want to be? What kind of a community do I want to be a part of? Who do we want to be as a people?

We look at Camden, N.J., and other former industrial cities like it, and the Occupy Movement and others are becoming aware of the enemy – it’s the 1% and their insistence on corporate profit as more important than any other human values. Capitalism, out of control, is destroying our country, our cities, our families, and unfortunately, individuals.

Fortunately, here in Brockport, we voted to keep our village government and support it. Camden, NJ and other cities have not had citizens as committed and knowledgeable. Those who could afford it emigrated to the suburbs and left the poor to fend for themselves. Here in Brockport, there are enough of us left in the Village who care about it and aren't ready to turn it over to the greedy capital extractors who would destroy it for a buck.