FROM THE ARCHIVES
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Re: Urban settler
[Rod Dreher 03/16 08:47 AM]To be clear, I don’t fault your Houston correspondent, Jonah, for making the choice she and her husband did. Again and again, let me say that CC is not an ideology, it’s a sensibility, and sometimes the ideals we hold will conflict. I’ve made clear that if Julie and I didn’t believe our neighborhood was safe — at least as safe, and perhaps more safe, than the Capitol Hill neighborhood I lived on for years — we wouldn’t be here. And if we didn’t have a good school arrangement, and had to use the public schools, we’d be in the suburbs too. Most people can’t have everything. From my perspective, your correspondent is doing the most conservative and countercultural thing she can do nowadays, which is to stay home with the kids and make material sacrifices to make that possible. (Second most conservative thing she can do: turn off the TV, if she has one). Caleb’s “Urban Settler” might disagree with this. I suspect that what U.S. might be responding to is a sense among some white conservatives that they have to run as far and as fast as they can from anything that says “urban decay” — this for reasons that are understandable in some cases, and ugly in others. I’d lived in Dallas for a year before we started looking in earnest for a house, and if you had asked me during most of that time if I would have chosen to live in the neighborhood I live in now, I would have thought you were nuts. Junius Heights is too close to the ‘hood, I thought. But later, when I actually started to look closely at this neighborhood and the actual crime stats, the picture changed, and I realized that I was acting out of an unreasonable fear and probably even prejudice. And it’s this kind of prejudice — not a conclusion based on a reasonable considerations, but on irrational fear — that leads to middle-class people abandoning urban neighborhoods that ought to be fought for.
On the other hand, as I write in the book, a guy I know who lives out not too far from Mitch left his dream house in an old neighborhood because he got tired of the cops having to come down his street all the time to deal with Mexican laborers living 20 or more to a rent house, drinking, fighting and partying — and the city would do nothing to stop it. He worried about raising a family in that neighborhood with all the police trouble, and the unwillingness or inability of the authorities to do something about it. From what I know, he made the right choice there, even though it broke his heart to do so. This too is one of the prices we pay for not guarding our borders, and wanting to have cheap illegal immigrant labor here to keep prices for goods and services down.
Anyway, all I ask is that people examine their motives for their choices, and realize that where we choose to live matters to our families and our communities in ways we don’t often consider.
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