Here is a story that tells what is happening in rural California and how the economic meltdown is effecting the hinterlands first, before you see it in larger urban areas.
A Vandalized Valley by Victor Davis Hanson
I am starting to feel as if I am living in a Vandal state, perhaps on the frontier near
Carthage around AD 530, or in a beleaguered Rome in 455. Here are some updates
from the rural area surrounding my farm, taken from about a 30-mile radius. In this
take, I am not so much interested in chronicling the flotsam and jetsam as in fathoming
whether there is some ideology that drives it.
Last week an ancestral rural school near the Kings River had its large bronze bell stolen.
I think it dated from 1911. I have driven by it about 100 times in the 42 years since I got
my first license. The bell had endured all those years. Where it is now I don’t know. Does
someone just cut up a beautifully crafted bell in some chop yard in rural Fresno County,
without a worry about who forged it or why — or why others for a century until now
enjoyed its presence?
The city of Fresno is now under siege. Hundreds of street lights are out, their copper wire
stripped away. In desperation, workers are now cementing the bases of all the poles — as
if the original steel access doors were not necessary to service the wiring. How sad the synergy!
Since darkness begets crime, the thieves achieve a twofer: The more copper they steal, the easier
under cover of spreading night it is to steal more. Yet do thieves themselves at home with their
wives and children not sometimes appreciate light in the darkness? Do they vandalize the street
lights in front of their own homes?
In a small town two miles away, the thefts now sound like something out of Edward Gibbon’s
bleaker chapters — or maybe George Miller’s Road Warrior, or the Hughes brothers’ more
recent The Book of Eli. Hundreds of bronze commemorative plaques were ripped off my town’s
public buildings (and with them all record of our ancestors’ public-spiritedness). I guess that is
our version of Trotskyization.
The Catholic Church was just looted (again) of its bronze and silver icons. Manhole covers are
missing (some of the town’s own maintenance staff were arrested for this theft, no less!). The
Little League clubhouse was ransacked of its equipment.
In short, all the stuff of civilization — municipal buildings, education, religion, transportation,
recreation — seems under assault in the last year by the contemporary forces of barbarism.
After several thefts of mail, I ordered a fortified, armored mailbox. I was ecstatic when I saw
the fabricator’s internet ad: On the video, someone with an AK-47 emptied a clip into it; the
mail inside was untouched. I gleefully said to myself: “That’s the one for me.” And it has been
so far. But I wonder: Do the thieves not like to get their own mail? Do their children not play
Little League? Do they not want a priest at their funeral? Would they not like to drive their cars
without worrying about holes in the street? Or is their thinking that a rich society can cover for
their crimes without their crimes’ ever much affecting them — given that most others still do not
act as they do?
I know it is popular to suggest that as we reach our sixties, everything seems “worse,” and, like
Horace’s laudatores temporis acti, we damn the present in comparison to the past. Sorry, it just
isn’t so. In 1961, 1971, and 1981, city street lights were not systematically de-wired. And the fact
that plaques and bells of a century’s pedigree were just now looted attests that they all survived the
Great Depression, the punks of the 1950s, and the crime-ridden 1970s.
A couple now in their early 90s lives about three miles away from me on their small farm. I have
known them for 50 years; he went to high school with my mother, and she was my Cub Scout leader.
They now live alone and have recently been robbed nine, yes, nine, times. He told me he is thinking
of putting a sign out at the entrance to his driveway: “Go away! Nothing left! You’ve already taken
everything we have.” Would their robbers appreciate someone else doing that to their own
grandparents? Do the vandals have locks on their own doors against other vandals?
There is indeed something of the Dark Ages about all this. In the vast rural expanse between the
Sierras and the Coast Ranges, and from Sacramento to Bakersfield, our rural homes are like stray
sheep outside the herd, without whatever protection is offered by the density of a town. When we
leave for a trip or just go into town, the predators swarm.
Last summer several cars drove into my driveway, the surprised occupants ready with all sorts of
innocent-sounding inquiries: “We just are looking for a rental.” “Do you have scrap for sale?”
“We’re having car trouble.” And so on.
All this serves as a sort of red/green traffic light: If someone comes out from the house, the driver
poses the question and then abruptly leaves; but if no one appears, he strikes quickly. I remember
three or four intruders I confronted this year who had trucks as nice as or nicer than my 2006 Toyota.
Two had sports apparel more expensive than my jeans and sweatshirt. All were heavier than I. In
other words, malnourishment, the desire for basic transportation, the need for clothing on their backs —
all the classically cited catalysts for stealing — are not what is driving these modern vandals.
At a local gathering last week, lots of farmers — of a variety of races and religions — were swapping
just such stories. In our new Vandal state, one successful theft begets another — at least once deterrence
is lost. In my case, one night an old boat in the barn was stripped. Soon, the storage house was hit. Ten
days later, all the antique bolts and square nails were taken from the shop. Usually — as is true with the
street lights — the damage to the buildings is greater than the value of the missing items. I would have
given the thieves all the lost items rather than have had to fix broken locks and doors.
I just spoke with another group of farmers at a rural fairground. Every single person I talked to has had
the copper wire ripped out of his agricultural pumps within the last two years. The conduits taken from
my own 15-horsepower and 10-horsepower pumps were worth about $200 at most. The repair bill was
$1,500.
Most farmers have lost any steel or iron lying around their barnyards, whether their grandparents’ iron
wagon hardware or valuable replacement furrowers and discs. Stories of refuse piled in their vineyards
and wrecked cars fished out of their orchards are monotonous. Did the thieves never eat raisins, a peach,
an almond? And did they not appreciate that if we did what they did we would all starve?
As I write, I am looking out the window toward my barn at a strange new trash pile that, presto,
appeared overnight while I slept: all the accouterments of an old car — seats, dashboard, outside
moldings, etc. — are heaped together, along with household garbage. What am I to do with it? I can’t
burn it. (Believe me, an environmental officer would appear out of nowhere at the rising of the toxic
smoke to fine me, as surely as he is absent when the garbage and refuse are tossed on the roadsides
outside of town.) There is too much of it to pile into my $100-a-month Waste Management bin, where
I put the plastic garbage sacks tossed by the mailbox each week. It would take two trips in my pickup
to haul it to the distant county dump. So for now, the problem is mine, and not that of the miscreant
who tossed it. Was he thinking, “Mr. Hanson has more time, more money, more concern over trash,
or more neuroticism of some sort, and therefore is more likely to deal with my trash than I am”? —
as if to say, “I can live in a neighborhood where wrecked car parts litter the road; he obviously cannot.”
So are these tossers simply comfortable with refuse on our streets, or are they not, but, like irked toddlers
with soiled diapers, expect someone else to clean up after them?
And is not that the point, after all? Behind the easy criminality of stealing metal or driving outside of town
to toss your garbage is an implicit mentality, as frightening as it is never expressed. Someone will indeed
take the garbage away. And someone indeed will have copper wire for others to harvest for their needs.
And someone will pay the taxes and costs associated with the commission of the crime, efforts at
prevention, and rare apprehension of the criminal. And lastly, someone most certainly should. In our
crude radical egalitarianism, the fact that one has more, and another less, is de facto wrong, and invites
popular remedies. Now, for every crime committed, a new sociology will arise to explain away its
commission. We are back to the bankrupt French philosophers who asserted: “Property is theft!”
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