I submit: the traditional concept of “building character” is out the window.

Once upon a time, a fully realised person was something one became. Entailing education, observation, experimentation, and sometimes humiliation, “coming of age” was hard work. When the project succeeded, we developed a gradually richer understanding of what it means to be human and what constitutes a fruitful life. This ongoing project was halted only by death. Maturity was the result of accumulated experience (some of it dire) and much trial and error (both comical and tragic), helping explain why wisdom, as opposed to intelligence, was mostly the preserve of the old. We admired the “self-made man”, because character was a creation — one constructed often at great cost. Many a “character-building” adventure, such as joining the Army, was a trial by fire.

These days, discussion of “character” is largely relegated to fiction workshops and film reviews. Instead, we relentlessly address “identity”, a hollowed-out concept now reduced to membership of the groups into which we were involuntarily born — thereby removing all choice about who we are. Rejecting the passé “character building” paradigm, we now inform children that their selves emerge from the womb fully formed. Their sole mission is to tell us what those selves already are. Self is a prefabricated house to which only its owner has a key.

This is not an essay about transgenderism per se. Nevertheless, our foundational text is excerpted from Christopher Rufo’s September 2022 comment, “Concealing Radicalism”, which quotes adolescents from a TikTok video on gender assembled by Michigan’s education department:

“I am a triple threat: I’m depressed, anxious, and gay.”

“Last night at about 2am, I put in my bio that I identify as ‘agender’, which is different than non-binary because non-binary is like neither gender, right? Agender is like the grey area between genders.”

“Hi, my name is Elise. I’ve used she/her pronouns all my life. But recently, and for a while, I’ve been struggling with gender issues as well as a whole lot of other identity things. So, I finally gave in and ordered a [breast] binder for myself and it just came in today.”

“A rational observer might suspect,” Rufo notes, “that these youths are in a state of confusion or distress, but rather than explore this line of reasoning, the education department.,, promote a policy of immediate and unconditional affirmation.” He quotes Kim Phillips-Knope, leader of the LBGTQ+ Students Project: “Kids have a sense of their gender identity between the ages of three and five, so about the time that kids have language, they can start to share with us whether they’re a boy or a girl — usually those are the only things that they will identify as, because those are the only options we’ve given them.” He adds: “In response to a teacher who asked how to respond to a student in her classroom who claims to have ‘she/he/they/them’ pronouns, Amorie [a staff trainer] responded adamantly: ‘Go with what the kid says. They’re the best experts on their lives. They’re the best experts on their own identities and their own bodies.’”

I further submit: throwing kids who just got here on their own investigative devices — refusing to be of any assistance aside from “affirming” whatever they whimsically claim to be; folding our arms and charging, “So who are you? Only you know” — is child abuse.

The idea that your psyche is set from birth is intrinsically deterministic and therefore grim. The vision it conjures is fatalistic and mechanical: all these traits are hardwired, and life involves winding up the clockwork toy and watching it totter across the floor until it runs into the wainscotting. If a newly emerged self already exists in its entirety, there’s nothing to do. In contrast to becoming, being is an inert affair.

We haven’t given these young people a job. Contemporary education strenuously seeks to assure students they’re already wonderful. Teachers are increasingly terrified of imposing any standards that all their wards will not readily meet, so everyone gets a gold star. The Virginia school district of the once-renowned Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology now aims for “equal outcomes for every student, without exception”. A pedagogical emphasis on student “self-esteem” became dislocated from “esteem for doing something” decades ago. Why should any of these kids get out of bed? No wonder they’re depressed.

Minors don’t know anything, which is not their fault. We didn’t know anything at their age, either (and may not still), though we thought we did — and being disabused of callow, hastily conceived views and coming to appreciate the extent of our ignorance is a prerequisite for proper education. Yet we now encourage young people to look inward for their answers and to trust that their marvellous natures will extemporaneously reveal themselves. With no experience to speak of and no guidance from adults, all that many kids will find when gawking at their navels is pyjama fluff. Where is this mysterious entity to whose nature I alone am privy?

There’s nothing shameful about being an empty vessel when you haven’t done anything and nothing much has happened to you yet. Telling children, “Of course you don’t know who you are! Growing up is hard, full of false starts, and all about making something of yourself. Don’t worry, we’ll give you lots of help” is a great deal more consoling than the model of the ready-meal self. We demand toddlers determine whether they’re “girls or boys or something in-between” before they have fully registered what a girl or boy is, much less “something in-between”. Placing the total onus for figuring out how to negotiate being alive on people who haven’t been given the user’s manual is a form of abandonment.

Adults have an obligation to advise, comfort, and inform — to provide the social context that children have none of the resources to infer and to help form expectations of what comes next.  Instead, we’re throwing kids helplessly on their primitive imaginations. The first time I remember being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I clearly remember answering, “a bear”. I wasn’t trying to be a wiseass. I just wasn’t up to speed on the ambitions to which I was expected to aspire. Little wonder that kids are now “identifying” as cats. Next, they will be identifying as electric lawnmowers, and we will have asked for it.

In my teens, we employed the word “identity” quite differently. We thought having an “identity” meant not only being at home in our own skins, but also having at least a hazy notion of what we wanted to do with our lives. It meant connecting with the likeminded (I found kindred spirits in my junior-high Debate Club). An “identity” was fashioned less from race or sexual orientation than from the discovery of which albums we loved, which novels we ritually reread because they spoke to us, which causes we supported, which subjects interested us, and which didn’t. It meant figuring out what we were good at (I was good at maths, but in second-year calculus I hit a wall) and what we couldn’t stand (me, team sports). Identity was fused with purpose: I knew I was drawn to writing, the visual arts, and political activism (the latter making me rather tiresome).

We were as self-involved in our determination to be individuals as Gen Z, but that particularity was commonly assembled from the cultural smorgasbord of other people and what they’d thought and made: Kurt Vonnegut or William Faulkner, Catch-22 or The Winds of War, Simon and Garfunkel or Iron Butterfly, hostile or gung-ho positions on Vietnam. Naturally this is a version of identity subject to change. That’s the point. It’s supposed to change. I no longer listen to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

The self is not found but made, because meaning is made. Rather than be unearthed like buried treasure, meaning is laboriously created, often by doing hard things. I cringe a bit recalling the person I was in my twenties, because she represented an early stage of an ongoing project that I have modified much in the years since. My twenties were an early draft of a manuscript whose sentences I have revised, pruned, and qualified. Ideally, if I keep forcing myself to do hard things — take on the premise of a novel that at first I have no idea how to execute, move to still another country, cultivate new friendships — the later drafts of my eternally incomplete manuscript will be more captivating. I would arguably be a fuller person had I done the very hardest thing — having children — but as a not-half-bad second best, I have committed to a marriage of 20 years and counting and thus to a man who moors me. Only death will part us.

Of course, in constantly reforming and refining who we are, we can lose aspects of ourselves from earlier drafts that we should have kept. I no longer dance alone for hours in the sitting room, and I miss that abandon. For years I crafted ceramic figure sculpture, and I’m not sure that substituting journalism as my primary side-line to fiction writing constituted an improvement. Towards the very end of our lives, many of us will drop pretty much every paragraph we ever added, and we’ll go from novel to pamphlet.

Nevertheless, given the choice I’d prefer to spend time with me in the present than with me at 35. I know more (although what I learn now has trouble keeping up with what I forget), my sense of humour is sharper, and rather to my surprise I’m humbler. I’ve more perspective; while that perspective is often bleak, that very bleakness — a gleeful bleakness — can be entertaining. I’m not as neurotic about what I weigh, and I am more generous, both in relation to contemporaries and younger aspirants. I’m less concerned with my professional status, and I think much more about death (which is torturous but intelligent). Some of this profitable evolution was effortlessly organic, but much has issued from a challenging career, the fruit of taking a big risk in my youth that’s paid off.

Clearly, some aspects of character, of self, are determined from the off. I’d never have become a nuclear physicist no matter how hard I tried. But the conventional “nature versus nurture” opposition still eliminates agency: you act mindlessly as whatever you were born as, or you are submissively acted upon. Where on this nature-nurture continuum does the object of all this theorising have a say in the outcome? I’m leery of venturing into the prickly no-go of sexual orientation. Yet while I’m open to the idea that some people are born gay, choices can affect what gets you off. We hear repeatedly from big consumers of online pornography that their tastes begin to change, and it takes more and more extreme videos to become aroused, until actual humans in real life will no longer do the trick. Watching porn is a choice. Even sexual proclivities exhibit some plasticity.

Following the modern script, 14-year-olds have learned never to say, “I’ve decided to be trans”, because all my friends are trans and I feel left out, but always, “I’ve discovered that I am trans”. This passive, powerless version of self has implications. We’re telling young people that what they see is what they get — that they already are what they will ever be. How disheartening. What a bore. Whatever is there to look forward to? Many victims of this formulation of existence, which apparently requires little of them besides all that being, must reach inside themselves and come up empty-handed. At the direction of the sort of educational authority Chris Rufo quoted above, they’ve undertaken a psychic archaeological dig, only to be left with a pit. So they feel cheated. Or inadequate. Convinced that they alone among their peers exhumed nothing but a disposable cigarette lighter.

By withholding the assurance, “Don’t worry about not knowing who you are; you’re just not grown up yet, and neither are we, because growing up isn’t over at 18 or 21 but is something you do your whole life through”, we are cultivating self-hatred, disillusionment, bewilderment, frustration, and fury. Young women often turn their despair inward — hence the high rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and cutting. Young men are more apt to project the barrenness of their interior lives onto the rest of the world and take their disappointment out on everyone else.

In a trenchant essay last autumn, “Mass Shootings and the World Liberalism Made”, Katherine Dee seeks a deeper explanation for the mass murders committed by disaffected young men, whose blind rage and misanthropy now express themselves in the US at a rate of twice per day.  Gun proliferation, Dee claims, is not the core driver. Rather, “we have a nihilism problem”. The videos left behind by the Sandy Hook child killer Adam Lanza suggest a belief that “even if we could free our ‘feral selves’ from the shackles of modern norms, there would be nothing underneath. Just blackness. A great gaping hole. For many mass shooters, the only reasonable response to this hole is death — the complete extermination of life. Not just theirs.”

According to Dee, all these atrocities have hailed from “a world where everything revolved around the individual”. The result is narcissism, which “is expressed through our perpetual identity crises, where chasing an imaginary ‘true self’ keeps us busy and distracted. We see it in the people who use their phones and computers like they’re prosthetic selves, who are always there, but never present, gazing endlessly at their own reflection in the pond.”

An authentic sense of self commonly involves not thinking about who you are, because you’re too busy doing something else. It is inextricably linked to, if not synonymous with, a sense of meaning. Nihilism, an oxymoronic belief in the impossibility of believing anything, can prove literally lethal. Young men who feel no personal sense of purpose are inclined to perceive that nothing else has a purpose, either. They don’t just hate themselves; they hate everybody. In telling people who’ve been on the planet for about ten minutes that they already know who they are, and that they’re already wonderful, we’re inciting that malign, sometimes homicidal nihilism. Because they don’t feel wonderful. They’re not undertaking any project but, according to the adults, inertly embody a completed project, which means the status quo is as good as it gets — and the status quo isn’t, subjectively, very good.

Transgenderism may have grown so alluring to contemporary minors not only because it promises a new “identity”, but because it promises a process. Transforming from caterpillar to butterfly entails a complex sequence of social interventions and medical procedures that must be terribly engrossing. Transitioning is a project. Everyone needs a project. Embracing the trans label gifts the self with direction, with a task to accomplish. Ironically, the contagion expresses an inchoate yearning for the cast-off paradigm whereby character is built.

We should stop telling children that they’re the “experts on their own lives” and repudiate a static model of selfhood as a fait accompli at birth. Sure, some inborn essence is particular to every person, but it’s a spark; it’s not a fire. We could stand to return to the language of forming character and making a life for yourself, while urging teachers to exercise the guidance they’ve been encouraged to forsake.

As we age, we’re not only that unique essence in the cradle, but the consequence of what we’ve read, watched, and witnessed; whom we’ve loved and what losses we’ve suffered; what mistakes we’ve made and which we’ve corrected; where we’ve lived and travelled and what skills we’ve acquired; not only what we’ve made of ourselves but what we’ve made outside of ourselves; most of all, what we’ve done. That is an exciting, active version of “identity” whose work is never finished, full of choice, enlivened by agency, if admittedly freighted with responsibility and therefore a little frightening. But it at least provides young people something to do, other than mass murder or gruesome elective surgery. (read more)

Baby-led weaning was coined in the early 2000s, and it advocates that, instead of parents spooning food into their baby’s mouth, they let the baby take the lead by feeding themselves, with parents putting a boiled piece of broccoli, say, or a small cup of hummus on the high-chair tray, which the baby can eat with their fingers. Baby-led weaning became so popular that the baby-led approach has expanded to all areas of early parenting, with baby-led sleeping, baby-led walking and baby-led potty training. Baby-led parenting, in other words.

I embraced the baby-led approach with enthusiasm that was really relief. Hell, I didn’t know how to do anything with these babies – I was just some idiot who put their nappies on the wrong way round every time. How marvellous I could delegate all complicated decisions to my infants! Now they wouldn’t scream at me anymore when I tried to make them do something they didn’t want, ie have a nap. The babies would be in charge.

This did not work out as well as I’d hoped. Baby-led weaning was fine. Baby-led sleeping, however, meant that none of us slept at all. It turned out that my babies were even more clueless than me about how they should be raised. And so, I returned to attempting to get them on a schedule, which they didn’t love, and it wasn’t always fun for me. But eventually, all three of us were sleeping at night.

The first generation of kids who grew up with the baby-led approach are now in their late teens and early 20s, and we are currently living in a baby-led world. Young people have always believed that they know better than the older generation, and now the older generation agrees with them. Middle-aged and experienced editors working in journalism and publishing live in fear of printing something that might displease the twenty-somethings who work in their company’s digital and publicity departments. Parents defer to their teenaged children about the correct languages to use and opinions to hold.

Some teachers even capitulate to the teenaged bullies in their class: last month, the Times reported that a girl in a London private school “was surrounded by up to 60 students who screamed and spat her” after she questioned gender ideology. “Teachers were initially supportive but withdrew their backing after the other sixth-formers accused the girl of transphobia, and the school ended up apologising for not maintaining a ‘safe-space’ in the sixth form,” wrote Nicola Woolcock, the paper’s education correspondent. This girl, ‘Kate’, was interviewed by Julie Bindel for UnHerd last week and she described overhearing her favourite teacher apologising for Kate’s “terrible, hateful behaviour”. Kate, who had only recently left hospital where she was being treated for anorexia, ended up leaving the school.

Babies are tyrants. If they don’t get their way, they cry, they scream as if the world is ending and no compromise is possible. Two babies screaming together, I can tell you from experience, is a nightmare. A pack of them is unimaginable, so I have some sympathy with the teachers at Kate’s school. Anyone who has ever raised a toddler might find the now regular Twitter meltdowns when someone’s employer hasn’t done exactly what they wanted strangely familiar. This is part of the reason the phrase “baby-led” is so alluring: no parent wants deal with a screaming tantrum, and no employer does either. So much easier to let the kids lead the way, even if it does lead to a Lord of the Flies-type scenario, with the adults fearfully letting the kids dictate the norms, as appears to have happened at Kate’s school.

Younger generations have always looked for ways to differentiate themselves from the stuffy old farts who came before – their parents, in other words – while also seeking an identity that confers upon them a set of ready-made beliefs and a supportive social group. This has become much harder with the dissolving of traditional barriers between adults and young people; parents chase social media likes as passionately as their children, the kids are listening to Harry Styles and Kate Bush, just like their mum and dad. In previous decades you could be a punk, or a skater, or a goth. For the current young generation, it’s being a social activist, and the changing parameters in discussions about race and, in particular, gender have become the defining generational divide. Telling your mum off for using the wrong words is great way to prove that she’s old and passé, even if she does still go to Glastonbury. A lot of good has come from this: today’s teenagers are far more clued up than we were in the Nineties, when jokes about disabled, fat, BAME and gay people were pretty much par for the course in any stand-up show and school playground. But a lot of deeply weird shifts have emerged from this, too, and all of them are due to us now living in a baby-led world, where the grown-ups are too scared to say “No”.

Baby-led doctoring, for starters. In the appallingly sexist but undeniably revealing documentary, What is a Woman?, provocateur Matt Walsh interviews American paediatric professor Dr Michelle Forcier, who is dressed in a toga and talks in the soothing, beatific voice of a cult leader. She says that children are ready to be put on medical treatment to change gender “when they ask for it”. By “medical treatment”, she means Lupron, which is now used as a puberty blocker on gender non-conforming children, but has been used in the past, Walsh rightly says, to chemically castrate sex offenders. Forcier wrongly insists that puberty blockers “don’t have permanent effects”, and ends the interview.

Forcier is not an outlier. Trans activists now argue that confused four-year-olds should be seen as analogous to trans adults. Not very long ago, I received an email from my children’s nursery to say that a three-year-old who I’ll call Daisy was now a boy and should be called Robert. As it happened, my three-year-old had, that same morning, informed me he was an astronaut, but it hadn’t occurred to me to tell anyone (or NASA), and that’s because children’s identities are mutable. They are still discovering who they are, and that’s as true for three-year-olds as it is for 13-year-olds. By now, I’ve received several emails from parents I vaguely know, telling me their child — always under 15, invariably female — is trans and now goes by a new name. Those parents are, of course, only trying to support their child. But it is not supportive to publicly lock a child into an identity when, in a week, or month, or year, they will likely be a very different person.

In March, the Cass Report, an independent investigation into the quality of care for gender dysphoric young people in this country was published. It found that treatment by the NHS’s specialist Gender Identity Development Service had become mired in ideology, with clinicians too scared to raise concerns about rushing children into changing gender, or asking why girls are disproportionately now identifying as boys, lest they be accused of bigotry. If even doctors are too scared to press the brakes on unhappy children diagnosing themselves, what hope for parents?

Discussions about gender are often described as “toxic”, and that means they are characterised by tantrums and threats from activists — again, arguing tactics that will be familiar to parents of teenagers and toddlers alike, and yet that does not diminish their effect. Parents have been terrorised into buying their unhappy teenage daughters binders to suppress their breasts because ignorant and bad faith organisations have told them — without any evidence — that not doing so will push their children towards suicide. Similarly bosses of liberal organisations have allowed feminists to be muffled and denounced so as to avoid censure from young activist employees.

Adults in their 40s and 50s — my generation — remember what it was like when we were teens. Many of us cringed at the words our parents used: “the blacks”, “poofters” and worse. We tried to tell them not to use those words, but there wasn’t the embarrassment then as there is now about being a bit bigoted. An adult didn’t gain anything, really, from being what was called then politically correct and what is now called woke. Like I said, things are different now, and that’s clearly a good thing. But in our rush to not repeat the mistakes our parents made, too often we have forgotten that, as well as loving and accepting our kids, it is our job to guide and safeguard them.

I was talking to a friend recently about a mutual friend whose daughter has said she is a boy, and so her mum bought her a chest binder, and I said how sad I found that. My friend was shocked by my sadness.

“But what would you do if your daughter wanted one?” she asked.

“I’d ask her what she thought she could do as a boy that she can’t do as a girl, and I’d ask if she wanted to be a boy, or did she want to be different person,” I said.

“But it’s the daughter’s choice,” my friend said.

“It would be her choice if she wanted to self-harm. But I wouldn’t buy her the razor,” I replied.

I don’t know if I’m right, but, like Kate, I was a very unhappy adolescent girl who was treated for anorexia. So I know a little about unhappy and confused adolescent girls, and how much we attack our own bodies to express that unhappiness. I also know what it’s like to be a desperate parent who just wants their kid to stop crying, to be happy and healthy and safe, and to feel like I’m a good parent who listens. The baby-led approach is an expression of that because sometimes (often) we don’t know what’s best for our kids, especially when it comes to a new issue like gender. But guess what? Your kid doesn’t know either, and nor, it seems, does anyone else who is supposed to safeguard them. Our kids aren’t breaking down barriers, they’re rock climbing without any safety ropes, and we’re encouraging it. It’s time for my generation to grow up, and be the adults. (read more)

Peter Doocy: “Classified materials, next to your Corvette? What were you thinking?”

Biden: “My Corvette is in a locked garage, okay?” pic.twitter.com/d6tsZQWLYL

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) January 12, 2023

https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2023-01/House%20Rules%20Package.pdf

After decades of single party rule, FUPAZ have achieved utopia. My Sweet 16 power rankings are as follows (from most to least utopian): Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Baltimore, DC, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Boston, New Orleans, Atlanta, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles (only because of the weather). Every college town is also part of FUPAZ. Austin and Denver on the verge of membership. Did I miss any others?

Here are a few tips when visiting FUPAZ:

Find your tribe. I once met a well traveled Ethiopian man who said the most segregated places he has encountered in the world are FUPAZ, despite how much they pride themselves on diversity. They are soggy salad bowls, not melting pots. If you find yourself in the wrong tribal territory, you may be putting yourself at risk. One of the most fascinating tours I have done is the LA Hood Life Tour, where our guide regaled us with all sorts of colorful language and tales about his experiences. Highly recommended and 420 friendly.

Learn how to speak the local dialect and make sure your vocabulary is up to date. Instead of the outdated term “women”, say “bleeders”, “menstruators”, or “birthing people”. Women don’t exist and have no right to privacy in FUPAZ, as any man can destroy them in sports and go into their locker rooms. Adjust your tone to maximize nasally upspeak and vocal fry. That helps blend in by sounding as irritating as possible, as everything you say takes the form of a question seeking approval to reflect your insecure soullessness.
[...]
Avoid restaurants where the proprietors are not the same ethnicity as the food. That is cultural appropriation, which is punishable by public lynching under FUPAZ sharia law. Dine at places with the BLM and LGBTQ flag, as they are known for friendly service. If you’d like a sneer and mucus with your meal, just wear a MAGA hat. Even the speakeasies will continue to check your papers (shout out to Green Russell in Denver, would be a shame if more people piled onto their terrible reviews).

June is the best time of year to visit FUPAZ. During this festive period, FUPAZ denizens and their corporate overlords celebrate child grooming like it’s the Weimar Republic. If you are part of the 90% of the world’s population who finds this revulsive, you’re part of the problem and you need to catch up with the progress.

Who needs Pride Month when you have Pride Forever? The flag above has remained flying for years in a Karenland FUPAZ airport. At this rate, the only way it gets removed is if it’s replaced by the updated trans flag.

About a year ago, Nick Russo sent me a note. San Francisco was falling apart, he said, but the attention it received was disproportionate. Because of the city’s uniquely high concentration of influential social media personalities, there was a national consensus it was uniquely broken. But it was not. It is still not, which is something I both agree with and often write about — every city in this country is dying. What I did not realize, however, was how bad it was in places like Philadelphia.

Trash, violence, six-story flaming tire piles in junkyards dotting the city. Nick, a Philly-based reporter, guests today for Pirate Wires with an incredible account of incompetence from what may be one of the worst disasters of local politics in America.

-Solana

There are more than 40 licensed junkyards sprinkled throughout Philly’s poorer neighborhoods. Noisy, ugly, and pollutive, they collect mostly automotive waste like clunkers and spent tires. A 2018 report by the Philadelphia City Planning Commission called the junkyards “receivers of illegal scrap material, sources of revenue for the local drug culture, and generators of rats and other vermin.” They’re notorious for flouting regulations designed to prevent catastrophic fires like the one in September.

State and local officials have known about Philly’s junkyard problem for decades. In 2003, the EPA’s regional office assembled a Scrapyard Task Force (STF), composed of the five state and local agencies that’d previously been working piecemeal to enforce compliance. Since then, the STF has cited all but four of the city’s licensed scrapyards at least once, including one of them over 125 times, and they’ve shut down between 10 and 15 serial violators. 

That may sound impressive, but for as long as it’s existed the STF has been largely unable to fulfill its mission: to bring Philadelphia’s scrapyards into compliance with existing regulations. One such regulation stipulates that the height of any tire pile be no higher than 10 feet. On November 3 of last year, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) inspected Delaware Valley Recycling’s yard, a scrapyard along the banks of the Schuykill River. It passed inspection. Six days later, there was a fire there, and it grew out of control because it was fueled by tire piles as high as six stories.

How the yard passed inspection is unclear, but even if the DEP had issued a violation, it’s plausible nothing would’ve come of it. For example, in 2017, a junkyard in Philadelphia’s Kensington section that had already racked up almost 70 citations from the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I) in the previous 10 years got a visit from the STF, who found more violations, and promptly did nothing. A representative told reporters that their inspectors found “nothing imminently dangerous.” A year later, the yard looked like this.

And this is where one infuriating component of the city’s status quo collides with another. Philadelphia, like a lot of cities around the country, is in the midst of a major municipal staffing shortage: L&I is short on code inspectors and the Police Department is short on officers. Citywide, roughly one in seven positions sits unfilled. And so far, one of the city leadership’s few1 responses to the staffing crisis has been an October 2022 announcement that they will pay an outside firm $200,000 to complete a pay scale study… by the summer of 2023. How this will take a team of professionals eight months is beyond me. And pretending this is the best we can do is an insult to the intelligence of every Philadelphian. Of course we can do better. We simply lack the willpower.

Effeteness, like that displayed by our leaders' response to Philly's junkyard problem, is sucking the life from our city. It finds its most perfect expression in our mayor, Jim Kenney—Eeyore incarnate—who, after two police officers were struck by stray gunfire on the Fourth of July this year, told his constituents:

“I’m waiting for something bad to happen all the time. I’ll be happy when I’m not Mayor, and I can enjoy some stuff.”

Philadelphia is governed by miserable people who hate their jobs, who like the idea of power but can’t bear the burden of responsibility. Our staffing shortage and our junkyard fires expose this reality, because both issues remain unsolved only for lack of political will. But perhaps the most solvable problem of all—the most basic municipal service imaginable—is keeping trash from piling up in the street. And it’s here that Philly’s void of leadership is most visible.

Philadelphia’s spontaneously combusting scrapyards are also hotbeds for illegal dumping. According to a report conducted by our now-extinct2 Zero Waste and Litter Cabinet, residents have long complained that junkyards encourage short dumping—dumping waste in the middle of a street, sidewalk, vacant lot, etc.—in areas around the yards. But the problem is by no means confined to areas around junkyards. Throughout Philly, mostly in our poorest neighborhoods, junk haulers unload piles of construction debris, tires, and household furniture on residential streets to avoid legal dumping fees.

A good rule of thumb for municipal leaders: if children in your city have to stumble over piles of garbage on their way to school, you need to be better at your job.

In a functional city, business-savvy junk haulers would face a difficult choice between legal and illegal dumping. The former would be low-risk, low-reward: no chance of facing criminal charges or civil penalties, but modest profits. The latter would be high-risk, high-reward: heftier profits, but the possibility of steep fines or worse. In Philadelphia, though, the main question facing junk haulers is: why the hell wouldn’t you dump illegally? 

Observe: back in May, our Streets Department Commissioner told our City Council that, in 2021, his cleanup crews removed over 14,000,000 pounds of debris and 83,000 tires from over 1,300 dumpsites citywide. Many of these sites were dumping hotspots where haulers unloaded junk piles weekly or even daily. In other words, untold thousands of illegal dumping violations were committed in Philly last year. But only 220 of those incidents were assigned for investigation. 13 led to civil penalties, four led to issued warrants, and one produced an arrest. One!

The fact is, if you dump a giant pile of trash on the street of a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia, you will not face consequences. Full stop. This basic failure of municipal governance leaves residents to deal with constant eyesores, public health risks from vermin and insects that breed in the filth, depressed property values, and sometimes even two-alarm short-dumped-tire fires.

Just like our scrapyard issue, the city is well aware of the trash problem and has some basic structures in place for addressing it. The Police Department has an Environmental Crimes Unit (ECU) for whom priority number one is investigating illegal dumping incidents. They’re assisted in this task by a fleet of nearly 200 Streets Department surveillance cameras and three full-time employees whose only job is to monitor those cameras. And, hell, they’ve even got our notoriously soft-on-crime DA, Larry Krasner, publicly begging them to bring him more cases to prosecute.

The one thing they don’t have, however, is—you guessed it—manpower. In a city with over 14,000,000 pounds of trash dumped on the street annually, the ECU is staffed by a total of two people. In Krasner’s words: “You can’t have an environmental unit that’s only two people and expect them to generate the work of 10.” Here we have our soft-on-crime, tough-on-cops DA implying, at least as it pertains to illegal dumping, that we need more cops! Alas, the Police Department has 500 vacancies and another 800 out on (often phony) injury claims, putting us square in the middle of the staffing shortage, 1,300 officers shy of full capacity.

And so we’ve come full circle. Until this daunting but relatively straightforward problem of municipal governance—our staffing shortage—is resolved, our junkyards will go on burning and our streets will go on drowning in debris.

A question posed by a self-described Marxist, Humanist, ethereal bisexual recently flitted across my Twitter feed:

Solana: America could become great in ways that are inconceivable right now.

Pomp: What do we have to do?

Solana: I think we have to care about local politics, honestly.

Pomp: Okay, explain.

Solana: I think that we have really abandoned, like, basic shit. We have internalized a sense we’re not responsible for the world around us. We have a transient, rootless elite with a lack of loyalty to place. Smart people are not engaged where they are. Every city I drove through on a cross-country road trip was covered in trash. Once you internalize that this is normal, that’s the end. So you have to start there. You have to make where you physically are right now a better place.

We’re living in an era of basic civic dysfunction wrought by decades of rule by an ever-more-effete [Democrat] elite. This pathetic status quo has spawned reactionary movements both IRL and online. Strongman MAGA types are largely a reaction to the perception of national weakness. So are scores of anonymous Twitter accounts—Bronze Age Pervert leading the way, cultish figures like Raw Egg Nationalist following suit. But a great democracy can’t be imposed from the top down; national politics is for now a futile front. Online subcultures and dietary tweaks won’t move the needle either: we can’t raw-egg-slonk our way to national vitality. And this presents a problem, because saving America from an unhinged enemy sounds cool, as does sculpting your body in the image of Achilles. Scrutinizing your local streets department’s every move… not so much.

But we can become great in ways that are inconceivable right now. Thrusting yourself wholeheartedly into the life of your community is the antidote to effeteness. Great citizens give rise to great cities, great cities to great nations. We need to make local politics cool again—and along the way, burn this parasitic, apathetic governance culture to the ground. (read more)