Cruel and Unusual

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Clarissa

April 7, 2013

In the area where I live, we have a place that is especially horrid in terms of its ecology. There is a highway, a gas station, a car parking space, and a convenience store. The whole thing looks like the one in the photo but ours has more gas pumps and a lot more traffic. The stench of the gas and the exhaust fumes is enough to kill an elephant. You will be OK if you duck inside the convenience store really fast and then run out, but spending any time in this spot is unimaginable.

For a little over a week now, the same two women with the same 3 little girls have been sitting in front of the convenience store (facing the cars, the gas pumps, and the highways) and selling Girl Scout cookies. I don’t know what the value of this exercise is supposed to be but the situation of these children seems horrible. They spend hours each day, inhaling the worst kind of stench anybody can think of.

I don’t get this, people. What can possess one to bring one’s own child to such a nasty place and make her breathe in exhaust fumes day after day after miserable day?

And while I’m on it, we live in a residential area where there are crowds of people with small children. Since there is no playground, no sidewalks, and no backyards of the kind where children could play together (the operative word being together), the kids are forced to spend all their time playing in the parking lot, in front of garages, and in the road. There are many kids of all ages. And the houses in this neighborhood are not at all cheap (the one three houses away is selling for $570,000, which is quite a lot for this area.) Yet nobody among these well-to-do folks seems to have any problem with children not having a green, comfortable, safe place to play.

Family values, my ass.

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22 responses to “Cruel and Unusual”

Roberto Severino

April 7, 2013

People will do really stupid things in desperate situations but this is negligence on the part of the parents! I hope those children don’t acquire asthma from the polluted air.

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anon

April 7, 2013

Oif. They’re probably there because of the high traffic – higher likelihood that someone will stop and buy their cookies.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  April 7, 2013
  
  I’m sure that is the reasoning. But it is an extremely bizarre one.
  
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Andrea Harris

April 7, 2013

Wow, that neighborhood you live in sounds really badly planned. For some reason I always thought that Midwestern neighborhoods all had really big yards. All that space, the “big Prairie.” There goes another illusion!

We had the biggest back yard in the neighborhood, though in actual fact it was not all that large. But it was big enough for my father to make a Japanese garden, build me and my sister a playhouse, and put up the swimming pool (we had one of those metal jobs you put together and fill via the garden hose) every summer. All the other houses in my old, inner city neighborhood also had back yards. I’ve noticed the tendency to build huge homes with no yards to speak of in recent decades, but I don’t get it. And no local play park at all? What did people think children were going to do?

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  April 7, 2013
  
  There is a park area, of course, but it is of the kind where you have to drive in a car and then sit there staring at the child. That’s really not the kind of outside playing that I had in mind. I support the kind where in the summer the doors to the house are permanently open and groups of kids run in and out all day long with no adult supervision at all. This is how kids develop and grow.
  
  I’ll photograph what passes for a backyard here and post it.
  
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  1. Kathleen
    
    April 7, 2013
    
    Hahaha. I am laughing because your dream of summer with open houses and no adult supervision will never happen. Parents are very, very afraid. I think it’s because of the media. But they seemed absolutely convinced that if little Charlie is out of their sight for even 15 seconds, he has been kidnapped by a pervert. My childhood was like you describe – we ran around outside, rode our bikes, and were always home before dark. When I look now at the exact same neighborhood, the sidewalks are empty. No children are playing outside (and it’s not because there aren’t any – I see their parents wait with them for the bus every morning). Is it because children are addicted to television and videogames? NO. It is because their parents will NOT ALLOW them to leave the house. Not even in their own backyards (!) most of which are even fenced (!!) unsupervised. It is very, very sad. I am SO GRATEFUL that I came before all of that. I have questioned many parents about this, gently, but they are completely terrified and also convinced that the neighborhood is teeming with predators.
    
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    1. bloggerclarissa
      
      April 7, 2013
      
      “I am laughing because your dream of summer with open houses and no adult supervision will never happen. Parents are very, very afraid. I think it’s because of the media. But they seemed absolutely convinced that if little Charlie is out of their sight for even 15 seconds, he has been kidnapped by a pervert.”
      
      – Our area is the safest place one can imagine. These fears are completely baseless. But you are right, people still seem to fear something.
      
      “When I look now at the exact same neighborhood, the sidewalks are empty. No children are playing outside (and it’s not because there aren’t any – I see their parents wait with them for the bus every morning). ”
      
      – Yes!!! Every day at 4 pm, I see a woman walk 100 feet past my house down to the place where the school bus stops to pick up her sons who are about 10 and 12 years of age. Then she walks them home. The freakishness of this exercise gets to me every single time. I don’t know what the supposed danger awaiting these boys in the safest area in the world is supposed to be, in broad daylight when she can easily see them from her porch. The boys are really too big for all that. I’m so mystified by what she thinks might happen to them if she just waits for them on the porch.
      
      “Is it because children are addicted to television and videogames? NO. It is because their parents will NOT ALLOW them to leave the house. Not even in their own backyards (!) most of which are even fenced (!!) unsupervised.”
      
      – Exactly! What are the kids supposed to do? The only way for them to escape from the parents’ unceasing gaze is by losing themselves in a video game.
      
      ” I am SO GRATEFUL that I came before all of that.”
      
      – Me, too.
      
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  2. Andrea Harris
    
    April 7, 2013
    
    Seconding the comment about being able to run around outside all summer (which in Florida was all year) without adults hovering over us like bats. When our parents were home the doors were left unlocked, by the time I was old enough to ride a bike with training wheels (I was seven or eight?) I was allowed to ride as far as I could go. I even took the bus by myself when I got a little older so I could go to the book store that opened in the shopping district a couple miles away. All this without a cell phone, which did not exist in those days. And this all was in Miami in an era (the 1970s) when crime was high, though it would get higher in the 1980s when the Drug War really got going. But by then I had a car… and I more-or-less fearlessly drove everywhere, at all hours of the day and night. See, I had been taught from a young age how to take care of myself, and I was expected to know how to stay out of trouble. We even had pervert scares (usually “flashers” or the ubiquitous man in the van with candy), but we were simply told what sort of person and situation to avoid, not locked down 24/7.
    
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    1. bloggerclarissa
      
      April 7, 2013
      
      ” I even took the bus by myself when I got a little older so I could go to the book store that opened in the shopping district a couple miles away. All this without a cell phone, which did not exist in those days. And this all was in Miami in an era (the 1970s) when crime was high”
      
      – Since we have zero crime in this area, I’m concluding that this hyper-vigilance is not based on any reality and is simply neurotic.
      
      “See, I had been taught from a young age how to take care of myself, and I was expected to know how to stay out of trouble. ”
      
      – How else can one raise a self-reliant, independent person?
      
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  3. Andrea Harris
    
    April 7, 2013
    
    It totally is based on the things people are told by the media. It has almost zero base in actual reality. Also people have given up raising their children to be independent beings. This is all very convenient to the powers that be, who find a population too afraid of imaginary threats to leave their homes to be much easier to manipulate and control.
    
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el

April 7, 2013

Wanted to ask whether you want to write about North Korea ‘s threats RE their atom bomb(s) and US. Today saw in newspaper that Iranians happily follow the news and desire to be in the same situation too in the future.

You said before that if one country has the bomb, then all should too, but surely there is a practical difference between Israel and Iran? US and North Korea? Don’t you think that WW3 could approach fast with fanatical regimes getting the bomb? What would have happened had Syria had the bomb too?

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  April 7, 2013
  
  “You said before that if one country has the bomb, then all should too, but surely there is a practical difference between Israel and Iran? US and North Korea?”
  
  – Yes, there is one huge practical difference: the US has already proven it is more than willing to drop the bomb on human beings. None of these other countries has the same track record.
  
  “Don’t you think that WW3 could approach fast with fanatical regimes getting the bomb? ”
  
  – I don’t see how the US under Bush Jr. was any less fanatical than anybody else. The guy was a fundamentalist who wanted the end of the world to come as soon as possible. And he actually dropped bombs (if not nuclear ones) on other countries.
  
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  1. Andrea Harris
    
    April 7, 2013
    
    The idea that other countries won’t have the self-control to keep from dropping the bomb on someone seems to mostly be projection, because we refuse to accept how powerful we really are and how that means we have to learn to restrain ourselves and take some responsibility.
    
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N G

April 7, 2013

“I don’t get this, people. What can possess one to bring one’s own child to such a nasty place and make her breathe in exhaust fumes day after day after miserable day?”

How about homeless people keeping their children in unventilated and unlit self dug underground tunnels in Kansas City that are not even reinforced according to the pictures that I saw.

“Ah Northeast–where this cave was, I played football. Where I walked home from Childrens Mercy is now all prostitutes. My childhood home went up in a meth fire. Sears, Wards, Armco, Sheffield, Vendo jobs all gone. Northeast was a main KC area target for “The War on Poverty” and “Urban Renewal” and other Great Society “programs.” See how well they have worked?”

http://www.kansascity.com/2013/04/05/4164931/underground-homeless-camp-cleared.html

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  April 7, 2013
  
  And in the meanwhile, Kansas legislature is busy coming up with new revocations of reproductive rights. Yeah, makes total sense, Kansas.
  
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  1. cliff arroyo
    
    April 7, 2013
    
    The newspaper linked to appears to be based in Kansas City, Missouri (and the area East Bottoms appears to be there too).
    
    Point taken about craziness in Kansas. It’s been decades since I was in Kansas, but I remember it as an okay (not wonderful but not terrible either) place filled with mostly friendly and mostly reasonable people (apart from their weird liquor store laws and obsession with 3.2 beer).
    
    Does anyone have a clear explanation for what happened? It’s like finding out a distant cousin was committed or living under a bridge…..
    
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    1. bloggerclarissa
      
      April 7, 2013
      
      I keep confusing these two!
      
      “apart from their weird liquor store laws”
      
      – More weird than in Connecticut? Those are really bizarre.
      
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cliff arroyo

April 7, 2013

See for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_laws_of_Kansas

I’d always thought it was a remnant of being Carrie Nation’s home state.

Also, as I remember liquor stores could only have a single regulation small neon sign (something like two feet by two feet). Hotels and motels couldn’t have bars either, they could only have ‘clubs’ (once you checked in you were automatically a member). There was other weirdness too but tha’ts what I remember.

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Shakti

April 7, 2013

The idea behind shilling Girl Scout cookies at the convenience store is that they will sell more in a high traffic area. Plus, they think it’s most edifying for kids to learn to be door to door salespeople at an early age. At least those kids aren’t having their parents sell those cookies at work to their captive coworkers. Yecch.

As for the lack of green area where kids can play together, that would require a park built in the neighborhood, which would require people to think about anyone other then themselves and their own children when it comes to spending money. If anyone thought of having a swingset or such in their backyard or attractive woods it would immediately become the house at which to play, and kids would just come over whenever just they wanted, which requires an adult being there in the yard. Often the kids would come and play even when nobody is home. Most of these people work long hours, and don’t socialize on a friendly basis with their neighbors. They would be afraid of lawsuits.

I’m talking about kids lucky enough not to be supervised and unstructured every moment of the day. People have a mortal terror of this unsupervised, unstructured time. Many of those kids are going to be shuttled to all sorts of scheduled and structured activities in the summer.

Perhaps even more simply neighborhoods are designed around cars and not people.

I’m reading this memoir of this bioethicist and I’m certain you’d feel nostalgic.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  April 7, 2013
  
  “At least those kids aren’t having their parents sell those cookies at work to their captive coworkers. ”
  
  – That would be a lot better for the kids’ health.
  
  “People have a mortal terror of this unsupervised, unstructured time. Many of those kids are going to be shuttled to all sorts of scheduled and structured activities in the summer.”
  
  – Yes!!! This looks very sad to me.
  
  “Perhaps even more simply neighborhoods are designed around cars and not people.”
  
  – Yes!! Horrible!!!
  
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n8chz

April 7, 2013

It seems you have stumbled into what Ralph Brauer refers to as a “gasoline ghetto:”

Being a Midwesterner, I always like Midwestern small towns because at least a few of them are trying to resist becoming what I term Gasoline Ghettos–those villages of motels, restaurants, and other tourist traps that now line the outskirts of virtually every major Interstate highway intersection.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  April 7, 2013
  
  We won’t be attracting any tourists, so things are even worse than that. This is simply an area where people don’t go outside. In the city, the suburbs, the rural areas, in the summer, the Fall, the spring – there is never anybody outside. Ever. I’m still confused as to what people actually do. Television, yes. But surely not all day long??
  
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