The Hollow People

The New York Times recently carried one of the scariest things I've ever read. They have a video to go with it on the website that will make you physically ill.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/01/national/class/01ALPHARETTA-FINAL.html?ex=1118289600&en=c5e9f0cf11fd8e6b&ei=5070

They are the Hollow People, raising more little Hollow People, barely even human any longer. Their kids are like some poor, starved plant you carry around with you from one house to another, barely enough soil to stay alive, permanently stunted, never to know deep roots and fertile soil and sunshine, wind and rain. Just barely enough care to stay alive. Regular watering and fertilizer, so it must be healthy! But no insects, birds or other wildlife nesting in its shelter, no summer, no winter, no blossoming in the spring - just filling up somebody's corner until it outlives its usefulness and gets thrown away.

They are like second generation orangutans, born in a pretty good zoo. They have really good vets, they have handlers to play with them and feed them. They have some of their own kind put into the envionment so they won't get lonely, they have a pretty good simulation of their natural environment. But they don't really know who or what they are, or what the world is really like.

They look human, and they act human because they learn how it's done by watching TV and video games in the SUV while being driven from one place to another. They learn how humans live and how they dress and what they value by watching TV ads.

But they aren't really human any longer.

These people are living in hell (or a zoo, take your choice), and they are too shallow to even realize it.

If you believe that the statistical notion of a reversion to the mean applies in situations like this and not just squiggly lines on graph paper; if you think it's real and has wide applicability; if you believe that unsustainable trends eventually end; if you believe that anything that goes parabolic cannot have a 'soft landing;' then what American society is going to have to go through to produce normal human beings once again is unthinkable.

Comments

[Freedom Girl]

Its pathetic and sad. What is worse is that those people would look down upon us for having lived in the same place for 12 years, for driving a used car, for living in a small house. We live within our means. My child thrives. We love our community. We have enduring friendships. How could anyone possibly look down on that?

[dilettantedude]

Sounds like you've at least found human values, FG, where others have lost them. And ya know what? I'll bet the Hollow People don't do drugs or live wild lives or read subversive literature.

That would be Wrong.

[Edens]

>What is worse is that those people would look down upon us for having lived >in the same place for 12 years, for driving a used car, for living in a small >house.

Would they? From the family the article focused on, I rather got the sense that just the opposite was the case.

And you're right, Robert, they may not do drugs or read subversive literature but that's because they largely conform to the social circle they move within, which isn't all that different from the rest of us.

Guess maybe they're human after all.

[gypsy frocks]

It's an interesting article. On a personal note, it was amusing that the woman was so attached to Pittsford. I went to high school about a half-hour from Pittsford, and that was the hoity-toity plastic-perfect suburb that all the rest of us suburban kids made fun of for being so hoity-toity. But she's right that a lot of those Northeastern 'burbs at least have some history and real town centers and so forth, owing to having been around as independent villages long before being swallowed by the sprawl. Pittsford does have a very nice town center.

I don't have any antipathy for the people in the article. I feel kind of bad for them, because they don't sound very happy, but it sounds to me like they've made relatively reasonable choices given their situation. Sure, I disagree with them on a lot of things, and they sound very superficial in what they look for in terms of "security" and so forth, but I don't think they're actively bad-intentioned.

[dilettantedude]

"...but I don't think they're actively bad-intentioned."

bad intentions are not what pave the road to hell.

Of course, this sort of sentiment about suburbia is hardly new: Consider this poen written in the 1930's about a typical "garden suburb" of London.

http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=33551&poem=396637

Slough

by Sir John Betjeman

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town --
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week for half-a-crown
For twenty years,

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears,

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted Hell.

It's not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It's not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sports and makes of cars
In various bogus Tudor bars
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

[Stephen Patrick M.]

The woman described in the NYT article seems dissatisfied to some degree with her husband. After taking over the leadership role in the family, she wonders why her husband doesn't behave more like a family leader.

The husband apparently has no time to play tennis with the wife since he is working his butt off to pay for her tennis instructor.

The tennis instructor is probably screwing the wife since the husband is not at home to do that either. He is too busy working to pay for the maid because the wife is too tired from tennis ''lessons'' to vacuum.

The short-sighted husband is simply doing his part to maintain the illusion of a meaningful existence. This type of husband is just waiting to die of a heart attack before the age of 50. When that happens, the wife gets everything and marries some other sucker. C'est la vie. Hopefully for them, the afterlife is not a fairytale.

The rat race is a cruel joke played on those foolish enough to spend their short lives running it.

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