ArticleWhen my two boys were small, we adored reading Richard Scarry’s Busytown series, but gee the books hit grown-ups in the gut.
A Busytown meme explains why. It features a therapist saying: “You said you were disappointed with life and how the world operates. What were your expectations?” The answer is a screenshot from Busytown, a place abuzz with that village feeling many of us long for, and whose resident social animals ace being human together. But based on current projections, this isn’t the world my children can expect to live in as adults. It’s entirely our loss.
In Scarry’s vision, busy animals go about their day, from hapless Mr Frumble to local chaos merchant Bananas Gorilla, to Lowly Worm happily driving his apple car. From Postman Pig to Sargeant Murphy, the policeman-dog who wears his helmet to bed, Scarry’s lovingly drawn and frequently nutty characters give the town’s local institutions a personal face. In Busytown, people are prior to the systems that make life go well.
We could learn a thing or two from Scarry’s social animals, who are deep in each other’s lives. If media coverage of recent tragedies is any guide, our world is more a collection of atomised individuals living parallel lives of quiet despair, who increasingly rely on social services for a lifeline.
Not the most basic social system of all, second to the family: community.
We seem to have grown used to outsourcing to faceless systems, regulations, and processes, the business of being human together.
But we’re kidding ourselves if we’re counting on social services alone to solve human problems. There’s no substitute for the milk of human kindness.
You can see this system-centric focus in the recent suspected double murder-suicide in Western Australia and the findings of the inquest into the Bondi Westfield stabbings. Both terrible news stories have been painted as failures of underfunded, under-resourced systems. But system failure is downstream of social failure: the breakdown of our bonds with each other.
Jarrod Clune and Maiweena Goasdoue are suspected to have murdered their teenaged sons Leon, 16, and Otis, 14, out of despair, with reporting on the tragedy citing, as possible motives, recent cuts to their NDIS funding, and their utter exhaustion in caring for kids with complex needs. Commentary since has criticised ableist media coverage (“no choice: parents reached breaking point”) and proclaimed, loud and clear, that people with disability aren’t a “burden” and that “murder is never an option” for families in crisis. No argument here.
Left unsaid, though, is the fact that increasingly, we conceive of the “support” that that family so desperately needed as met by a service-provider charging a fee. Not from a circle of concern that radiates outwards, extending from immediate family to extended family, then to friends and other local connections, and only then to taxpayer-funded social welfare. You know, the way Busytown would probably do it.
Today, rather than freely “bearing each other’s burdens”, as old-fashioned biblical language would put it, we’ve become accustomed to paying for the privilege – an assumption that might be harder to shift than negative attitudes to disability. The private tragedy of that Western Australian family includes the fact we experience it as their private tragedy, not a failure of community. But we’re all implicated.
The recommendations of the inquest into the Bondi Westfield stabbings also lean heavily on a system-first response. Joel Cauchi’s psychotic rampage ultimately claimed six lives. Sickening crimes that might have been prevented, had Cauchi not fallen through multiple gaps in mental health services, as the coronial inquest found. A tragic detail of proceedings: Cauchi’s mother tried to alert his psychiatrist to his worsening psychosis seven times. She tried stepping into the gap. She tried.
But a mother’s love and fear can’t compensate for the lack of a village.
Instead, we settle for a village consisting of paid experts. Hence the inquest’s recommendations: the provision of government-run, short-term accommodation for mentally unwell people, access to on-site care, and increased funding for outreach services targeting homelessness.
Of course, government-funded services are always worth investing in, and a necessary fallback for people who lack other options. Maybe it’s also daunting and deluded (who has the time or patience?) to conceive us laypeople as personally responsible for some of the most vulnerable, and sometimes the most mentally unwell, among us. We defer to experts for good reason.
But looking to the government to fix everything is a misplaced hope.
Mind you, “small government” doesn’t describe my politics. I just recognise the limits of what governments can achieve. Impersonal systems will tolerate you but not befriend you or compensate for crushing loneliness. They also have no jurisdiction over that mysterious terrain beyond the power of the state to regulate: our inner lives as well as our willingness to regard each other as members – even neighbours and friends – of the same community.
Maybe it’s foolish to take our cues for a better world from Busytown, Scarry’s mid-20th century fantasy of small-town America. But for a children’s picture book, it grasps a truth we seem to need reminding of more than ever: we’re social animals. The system won’t save us. Only other people will.
Justine Toh is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. This article was first published by Eureka Street.
Illustration by Richard Scarry, from Busytown, published by Penguin Random House.