May 07, 2005

Latinos Litter. Who Dares Say That?

Logical Meme, a self-proclaimed “neoconservative voice”, has a valuable essay on the propensity of immigrants from Latin America to create a mess—an issue discussed by our Allan Wall over a year ago.

This was stimulated by a Boston Globe story [Mime plan’s language draws offense – Maria Cramer, Boston.com May 3 2005] which reported that an effort by “local artists” to start a campaign to influence their neighbors in East Boston has been derailed by self-righteous indignation in the local Hispanic community—apparently because of the candid nature of the original grant proposal:

“An initial proposal that the small group of local artists drafted about the effort described its mission as '’educating Latinos to stop throwing garbage in the city streets.’… The creators of the '’Change Your Attitude’ campaign…are themselves Latino…No one denies that an aggressive campaign is needed to clean up the streets in East Boston….The draft, which is ungrammatical at times, described Latinos as '’very nationalist,’ or still tied to their native countries, and said they do not feel a sense of belonging in the United States. '’This feeling of not belonging to a place creates and [sic] ideas of not caring for their city or the neighborhood where they live,’ the draft says.”

Logical Meme has a good deal to say about this:

“I work in Hartford CT, a city that, according to the 2000 census, is now more than 50% Black and Hispanic…The area of the city where I work, a formerly pristine area in the city’s heyday, is a battle zone representative of urban minority life. From where I park my car every day, I must walk past several ‘projects’ (aka Section 8 housing) where hispanics are, by far, the majority constituency. Day and night, people are hanging out of windows, walking around, milling about. Kids, cursing like sailors, run barefoot over needle-and-glass strewn grass, their parents apparently none too concerned.

“The sheer amount of trash and litter thrown everywhere is mind-blowing. On the sidewalks, in the grass, in the road, everywhere. Bottles, cans, candy bar wrappers, styrofoam cups, an endless supply of cigarette butts, empty cigarette boxes, etc…on a regular basis, I see the active discarding of trash and litter on the streets: the person who simply throws their empty Snapple bottle on the grass next to the sidewalk…The littering I speak of cannot be characterized as anything less than sheer contempt and disrespect for basic norms of civility and appropriate behavior…the objective difference in character simply clobbers one over the head: the neoconservative as the liberal mugged by reality.”

And Logical Meme draws dire conclusions:

“These are the ‘little things’ that matter, the demonstrative representations of value and respect (or lack thereof) that have ripple effects across a society. As such, these are the things that do serve to illustrate the character of an area’s inhabitants. These are the things that demonstrate litter to not be a consequence of poverty, but rather part of a cultural value system which causes and perpetuates poverty.”

Logical Meme—judging by his other writings and links, which do not include VDARE.com—appears to be a conventional neoconservative…maybe a bit more of an immigration sceptic than most.

Perhaps his attitude suggests that this now-dominant group is beginning to have doubts about the quality and consequences of the recent deluge of Hispanic immigration.

This would good news indeed.

Peter Brimelow is editor of VDARE.COM and author of the much-denounced Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster (Random House - 1995) and The Worm in the Apple (HarperCollins - 2003)