Complicated
By Mitch Berg
The woke mob is doing its best to try to simpify the Daniel Penny / Jordan Neely case into a matter of “if we’d only given him what he needed, he’d be alive and impersonating Michael Jackson today”.
For all its squawking about humanism, modern progressivism tries to boil humanity down into a series of material equation; if you give a “black or brown body” (as opposed to a human) food and a roof over their head and 12 years of an approved curriculum, they’ll turn out just fine.
It’s a seductive reductionism at best, and kind of cynically inhuman at worst.
But it’s not purely a product of our cultural left.
Among the many offshoots of the Penny/Neely case is the emergence of Neely’s father – who by all documentary accounts was a pretty horrible excuse for a father, even by “father of mentally ill drug addicted street person” standards. He’s come out of the cold to file a lawsuit against Penny. It’s the New York way.
Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire commented about it on his podcast last week, as the suit was filed.
Walsh pointed out the fact that the senior Neely was, by all the available evidence, a bad, mostly absent father who appears to be looking to cash in on the misfortune of a son he didn’t seem to have made a whole lot of time for when he was alive.
So far, so good.
But then he followed up with [paraphrasing closely, here] “kids who have good parents don’t grow up to be mentally ill crackheads harassing people on the subway”.
What “give people enough handouts or they’ll fail” is to the left, “living the prescribed life” is to the right; as if getting married at 23 and having a traditional household guarantees your kids will turn out just fine.
Don’t get me wrong – it certainly helps raise people whose heads are screwed on straight. A traditional two-opposite-gender-parent family that prays together, stays together, eats dinner, celebrates holidays together (regardless of everyone’s politics) and keeps life in persepective , all other things being equal, is going have a way better than even chance of raising kids that turn into normal, healthy, productive, well-adjusted adults. And that certainly wasn’t Neely’s chidhood.
But if you think it’s a guarantee?
Allow me to introduce you to mental illness, the world’s most merciless bitch.
The serious, debilitating ones – crippling depression, schizophrenia, extreme bipolar disorder and the dog’s breakfast of others – don’t care about how you were raised.
And for all the focus mental illness gets today, modern science still knows more about the dark side of the moon than about how the brain mis-wires itself.
You can be like this guy – from a well-off family, who grew up with all of life’s meaningful advantages, only for bipolar disorder to swerve him from an elite music program to a life of radical and sometimes violent personality swings, homelessness, occasional jail, living with his parents, gigging around a small town for extra money, and (after a brief flash of recovery when “they got his meds right”) an untimely death.
Or this guy, who grew up in a fairly normal if quite well-off family with both the means and the sincere motivation to raise a good kid – who slipped psychologically waaaaay off the rails and spent decades self-medicating, chemically and emotionally, to an extreme that harmed everyone within his personal blast radius, who eventually (and seemingly inevitably) succumbed, survived by parents who seemed broken hearted but to have seen and felt it coming for what must to any parent must have seemed an eternity. As I said five years ago:
And when I became a parent, his story – the whole family’s story, really – terrified me; it was possible, no matter how you loved your children, for the unreasoning, cackling spectre of mental illness and its sidekick, addiction, to take that kid from you no matter what you did and how hard you clung to the hope you could do something about it.
And I’m sorry to say I’m reminded of him in a story a family I know is living right now – a child who grew up in a pretty traditional, normal family, into a pretty normal traditional life. Married at 22, two beautiful and talented kids…
…who had a drinking problem. Which they gave up some time ago. Which seemed to allow a whole platoon of demons to come out to play. This person has since spent the past couple of years chasing around the country seemingly at random, has “come out” as the opposite gender, and is clearly in dire need of a qualified, competent, and perhaps supernaturally wise intervention (from which the “opposite gender” thing will almost certainly shield them).
Is it because this person had bad parents?
No. It’s not. Quite the opposite.
Bad parenting and the disintegration of the traditional family have incubated a lot of pathologies in this society. But not all of them.
So when Matt Walsh says Neely’s father was a disgrace – of course there’s no argument.
But when the big lesson he takes away is “this doesn’t happen to children of good parents?”
It’s not just simplistic and reductionist. It’s smug and ignorant.
December 10th, 2024 at 9:29 am
It’s not just simplistic and reductionist. It’s smug and ignorant.
Mangione is case in point.
also, if you give a “black or brown body” (as opposed to a human) food and a roof over their head and 12 years of an approved curriculum, they’ll turn out just fine.
This is about as racist as can be. As usual, when libturds scream “racist”, they are looking in the mirror.
December 10th, 2024 at 10:03 am
I recommend Clayton Craner’s book, “My Brother Ron”.
December 10th, 2024 at 10:21 am
While Walsh can often be over the top in his pronouncements I think he’s arguing against the cultural shift over that last 50 years, promulgated by the DemoCommies (it takes a village, for example) that families aren’t at all that important and the state would be a much better caretaker of “our children”. I don’t think he would disagree that families can also fail.
I think the notion that getting married at 23 and having a traditional household guarantees your kids will turn out just fine is a strawman.
December 10th, 2024 at 10:50 am
“But when the big lesson he takes away is ‘this doesn’t happen to children of good parents?’ It’s not just simplistic and reductionist. It’s smug and ignorant.”
AS OFTEN. That’s what’s missing from the quotation. It can still happen, it just doesn’t happen to children of intact, loving, two-parent families AS OFTEN as to children of broken homes. That’s not simplistic, it’s not reductionist, it’s statistics, easily verified, and says nothing about the justification for single parentage – widowed, mental illness, abuse, imprisonment – it’s simply a fact.
Of course there are examples on both sides – kids from broken homes who made good and kids from intact homes who went bad – but they don’t disprove the general rule. Telling single parents that their family situation is not optimal for the children hasn’t been controversial since Dan Quayle scolded Murphy Brown for encouraging young people to choose that lifestyle.
There’s a reason the traditional intact nuclear family is the most successful model ever devised to protect women and children while preserving family wealth. It’s not because proponents are smug or because the model is perfect. It’s because it works better than any alternative yet conceived.
December 10th, 2024 at 11:44 am
^ zactly
December 11th, 2024 at 7:23 am
“There’s a reason the traditional intact nuclear family is the most successful model ever devised”
Nuclear family was not devised, it s the product of natural selection/evolution.
December 11th, 2024 at 7:24 am
Perhaps we all owe an apology to the much maligned Nurse Ratched from Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. As many of us older readers recall, this was the novel that flung open the doors of our nation’s psychiatric hospitals.
Let’s remind ourselves that Kesey’s protagonist Randle Patrick McMurphy sought an easier stint in a psychiatric hospital to escape prison for statutory rape, a charge that would not go down lightly with our modern day Me Too.
Of course, Kesey’s characters were lovable and harmless and one would wonder what he would have made of a moon-walking Jordan Neely – but therein lies the basic sin of naive progressives, a refusal to admit that some people just need to be locked up – or at least force-fed their meds.
Bring back Nurse Ratched. She may be cold as ice and not very nice – but at least she can be trusted to keep the lid on hell.
December 11th, 2024 at 7:49 am
Yes, Greg, I agree. I’ve been saying this for years.
December 11th, 2024 at 9:15 am
I’m with Bigman on this. Of course there is no guarantee a child who is the product of a loving nuclear family won’t exhibit mental illness BUT as Bigman argues statistically his/her chances are much better. In fact i think i just saw the results of a study that children of intact loving families are generally more well adjusted and successful.
This is just common sense. For some reason Walsh’s generalization got to you Mitch.
December 11th, 2024 at 10:55 am
Perhaps we should draw a distinction between maladjusted and mentally ill.
Evil, selfish or cruel people are not necessarily ill, rather all too many of them do quite well. Their condition is typically self-generated – with perhaps a bit of a social push.
On the other hand, mentally ill people are in fact ill. Something is physically wrong with them, frequently causing behaviors that they cannot control.
Yeah, there is cross-over, mainly in addiction whereby shitty choices foster physical cravings that may or may not be permanent. In many cases, the lines are blurry, still society needs to make a distinction.
It is why we have psychiatric hospitals and prisons and though it is hard, the two should not be confused.
December 11th, 2024 at 12:36 pm
Walsh recommends a family structure that works out for 95% of kids vs Papa Neely’s strategy which maybe works for 50% of kids. Mitch’s complaint is that Walsh doesn’t do several paragraphs of throat clearing about the 5% to water down his main point.
The family tragedies from the 5% who succumb to mental illness and addiction is very sad.
The 50% failure of ‘modern’ family structures is destroying civilization.
But sure, fixate on the 5% failure rate, the divorce rate, the shackles of monogamy, and a dozen other feminist critiques of marriage to discourage traditional family formation. I’m sure if we just keep criticizing traditional family structure, we’ll get more people to choose that path….
December 12th, 2024 at 10:13 am
For reference, I believe that the rate of mental illness tracks family breakdown & divorce reasonably well. Not the only thing on the Pareto, but worth noting.