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What cities do to us and what we do to cities

Deer, Cats, and — Men

Some fifty years ago, five deer were released on a 280-acre island in Chesapeake Bay on the East Coast of the United States.

They flourished, until there were almost 300 of them. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, they began dying. Soon, there were only half of them left.

Yet, food supply was abundant, and no infection could be found.

But the deer kept dying — until there were only 80 remaining. Postmortem examinations brought to light a strange fact: Striking changes had occurred in vital organs which suggested great emotional stress.

Whether we find it a palatable truth or not, medical authorities believe up to one half of the ailments experienced by humans are psychosomatic, induced by psychological pressures, and not actual physiological illness. This simply means that many humans are experiencing the symptoms of overcrowding, of an annoying, enervating, confusing, chaotic way of things which can result in a whole host of effects, commonly diagnosed as various "illnesses."

Nor are cats any different. Crowding them together, similar to the rat experiment, resulted in what was half-humorously called a "Fascist transformation . . . with a despot at the top, pariahs at the bottom, and a general malaise in the community where the cats . . . seldom relax, they never look at ease, and there is continuous hissing, growling, and even fighting" (Saturday Review, November 8, 1969, quoting P. Leyhausen).

Sounds like New York, Tokyo, London, or Rome! Humans are no different.

Will the earth duplicate the pen? Will man go the route of the overcrowded rats, cats, deer, and mice? That's merely a rhetorical question. He already has. The only question remaining is: Will man go the ultimate route, and populate himself out of existence?

"I think we have 15 years to decide" answered Dr. Calhoun, lead scientist in the rat experiments." If we don't make up our minds in this time to reverse our population course, I'm pessimistic about the future of man."

 

Psychological Deterioration

We have separated "psychological deterioration" from "physiological deterioration." That is an oversimplification — the two are very much related.

Psychological stress (the main mental response of a human being to life in the 20th century) directly causes a host of physiological problems — high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, heart trouble, liver disease, ulcers, digestive disorders, exhaustion, asthma, insomnia, night sweats, headaches, reduced resistance to infectious diseases, endocrine (glandular) malfunctions of all kinds, and other hallmarks of urban living.

Many recognized physicians feel that a very large percentage (40, 60, or, some say, 90 percent!) of all physiological problems can be traced back to psychological stress, with urban areas the main culprits, as the following study demonstrates.

An exhaustive eight-year examination of 1,660 midtown Manhattan residents and workers, conducted by a five-man team based at the New York Hospital — Cornell Medical Center, found that less than one out of five (18½%) could be classified mentally well! A full four out of five New Yorkers had some symptoms of psychological disorders, and roughly one out of four suffered from neuroses sufficiently severe to disrupt his daily life. For the city as a whole, that would measure out to about 2 million seriously ill in their minds, with another 4½ million not well mentally, and only 1½ million mentally sound!

The Cornell-New York Hospital team could not find any evidence to support the idea that these illnesses resulted from a singular traumatic event which "snapped the string" or acted as the proverbial "straw which broke the camel's back." Rather, a lifetime of stress — a continuous piling up of mental constrictions, pressures, shocks, and impairments (which is to say a life of urban living) — is the more logical culprit.

 

"Life" in New York

A look at the typical New Yorker bears this out.

The blanched faces of subway commuters seem indicative of an extremely enervating day — but it's only 8:30 in the morning! The mail doesn't come on time, the cabs are filled, the phone circuits are overloaded. One hundred decibels of noise is a common punctuation in the day. In the words of Felix Riesenberg, describing the New York of a few years back:

"City of carpenters without wood, of plumbers without mercy. City of uncomfortable comfort stations. City of clanging radiators, of supine superintendents. City wherein there is no room to die. . .

"City wrought in flame. City of arguments unending. City of terminals, city of endings, city of the last attempt. City wherein no one knows whether he is coming or going."

The metabolism of New York City — the comings and goings, the ins and outs of commerce, the commuting of dull warm bodies — all represent a logistical problem which would baffle the best of generals. But it happens twice a day, five or six days a week, in bustling New York City.

During an average working day, over 2.2 million employees choke the offices, retail shops, factories, and government buildings in the central business district (CBD) of lower Manhattan. One estimate states that 3 million workers gorge that part of Manhattan south of 61st street every working day. This works out to about 250,000 people per square mile, 400 per acre, or the equivalent of a 10-by-10-foot block for each person. Of course they aren't in adjacent cubicles, they are stacked in multi-story office skyscrapers. A mere 500 city blocks hold half of all the wage and salary workers on Manhattan.

This tidal wave of humanity rolls in during the morning and rolls out during the late afternoon through an utterly constipated transit system. Those 300-horsepower monsters which devour oxygen and vomit smog while massaging our egos are lucky if they can crawl across Manhattan at six miles per hour in 1971. Compare this to a near double 11.5 miles per hour on one horsepower (a living one attached to a buggy) in 1907. This one fact alone, humorous as it is, makes a mockery of "Fun City."

But the inconveniences of traffic and deteriorating city services are really only minor compared to the deeper social cancers of crime, drugs, poverty, rat-infested "Welfare Hotels" and a government powerless to touch any of these problems.

 

New York's Deeper Problems

The "other half" — some sections in Harlem, Brownsville, or Bedford-Stuyvesant — also crowds into a density of 200,000 people per square mile in some sections, but they don't have the benefit of skyscrapers to divert their density upwards. Oppressed by the most inhuman living conditions, these Blacks, Puerto Ricans and representatives of virtually every ethnic group on earth, more often than not, are fighting and robbing each other — while venereal disease, infant mortality, tuberculosis, illiteracy, drugs, alcoholism, and crime are many times the rate of any other section of the city . . . or the nation . . . or the globe.

What's wrong?

For openers, New York is a political anachronism, governmentally structured much like the small, bickering, pre-World War I Balkan states, or the feudal city states of medieval Europe.

Nearly 1,500 competing municipal government bodies and special districts compete for funds and power. And New York's budget, second in the nation only to the Federal Government, buys nothing but steadily deteriorating services. While New York's population has remained steadily at 8 million for 30 years, the city budget has mushroomed from 1 billion to over 8 billion dollars. There are many causes for this, as a future PLAIN TRUTH article will explain, but suffice it to say here that the cost per person of hospital services is 10 times greater in New York than in a moderately sized city (100,000 to 300,000), and police services are three times as great, per person.

New York's annual budget, presently around $8 billion, exceeds the combined budget of the next largest 25 cities in the nation. Costs expand geometrically with the size of a city and New York has clearly grown beyond a manageable size.

Since an overview of massive New York City stretches our comprehension, let's focus down to one lone New Yorker. By going through a day with him, we can barely imagine how a giant city works.

 

A Day in the Life of a New Yorker

Some 140 million Americans wake up each morning in a Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area, the census definition for the nearly 250 urban agglomerations with more than 50,000 residents. About 50 million Britons, 10 million Australians or Canadians also inhabit such urban regions, but let's examine only one person, a New Yorker.

What's his average day like?

First he splashes cold water on his face, showers, flushes the commode, and brushes his teeth. There go approximately thirty gallons, or eighty pounds, of water. Simultaneously, eight million other New Yorkers make the total, between 6 and 9 a.m., about 240 million gallons of water for merely personal use!

A word on water. Each person uses approximately 50 gallons a day for personal use only: one gallon to drink, six to wash clothes, five for personal washing, 25 for a shower or bath, and three gallons for each flushing of the "water closet." But this is a microscopic percentage of our per-capita water consumption in cities. Direct consumption of water in cities is four times as much, about 200 gallons per person. But if you consider the vast amount of water necessary for every step in the scale of food consumption, per capita water use in the U.S. is somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 gallons per day.

For instance, to produce a slice of bread requires 35 gallons of water; an ounce of vegetables requires 200 to 300 gallons, a cup of milk 5,000 gallons, and a pound of meat up to 50,000 gallons of water (Georg Borgstrom, The Hungry Planet, page 414). Of course, these totals include all the necessary rains to grow enough grass to feed and water cattle, refrigerate the product, ship, process, and store it.

So much for water in the morning. Next, Mr. Average Citizen shaves, most likely using electrical power. It's impossible to know precisely how many electric alarm clocks, electric toothbrushes, electric ovens, and electric shavers drain power each morning at precisely 8 a.m., but the peak daily electric demand in cities has doubled every decade since 1930, now standing at 314 million kilowatts.

After expending those gallons of water and watts of electricity, Mr. Average Citizen eats breakfast — orange juice, two eggs, bread and butter. All made possible by a massive system of food commerce and gas heating. Take a look behind the scenes in your city's food and fuel systems.