Judging a book by its cover
It’s frightening how easy it is to fall into homelessness here in America.
The 1986 film is a classic coming-of-age story based on a Stephen King novella, exploring the darker edges of growing up and the fragility of innocence, set in late-1950s rural America.
Among its many unforgettable moments which haunted me the most weren’t the sentimental parts, but scenes where a group of small-town bullies, led by Ace Merrill (played superbly by a young Kiefer Sutherland) terrorise younger, weaker teenagers simply because they can.
Ace and his gang aren’t portrayed as racists, or bigots, or even particularly complex. They’re just cruel. They threaten violence, steal, humiliate and mock. And crucially, the film gives no explanation for their behaviour, no tragic backstory, no ideological excuse. They hurt people because it gives them a sense of power. That’s all.
I remember thinking it must be exaggerated. Surely, I thought, nobody in real life that young could be that nasty for no reason. I was wrong.
If were made today, I suspect we’d be expected to look for some deeper “-ism” behind Ace’s cruelty: racism, misogyny, anti-immigrant resentment, or some other moral category that would let us label and file him away neatly. But to do that would be to miss the point. Some people aren’t driven by ideology; they’re driven by something simpler and darker - the thrill of domination, the pleasure of hurting the vulnerable. Seeking a ‘cause’ for evil often avoids seeking a solution to it.
Glendale has long been considered one of the safer corners of Los Angeles County. But lately, my wife and her co-workers at a family-run cosmetic shop have noticed changes - an increase in visible homelessness, drug use and petty crime. Nothing dramatic, but unmistakable signs of a city under strain. Of the general decline in Los Angeles creeping outwards.
One morning, while speaking to a customer by the shop window, my wife saw a pair of hands suddenly clawing at the glass. The fingers scraped and pressed desperately against it. Looking down, she saw a man on the pavement - filthy, gaunt, his eyes wide and vacant, face darkened with grime. He looked like a zombie from and tried to climb up the window, begging to be let in, or perhaps not knowing where he was at all.
Someone called the police. They came, shouted at him for several minutes, then sat him up. He seemed to be on something, or perhaps just far gone in a fog of despair. Eventually, they took him away.
It wasn’t an isolated incident. More and more, she’s had to step over people sleeping in the doorway when opening the shop. Across the street, a homeless man has been living at a bus shelter. A local babushka told her he’s from the Armenian community in Iran. He once ran a business in America, was married, and had a son. When his wife became terminally ill, he spent everything trying to save her. She died. His business collapsed. He lost his home and now he and his son lives at this bus shelter.
Two weeks ago, his son - his last family member - was killed by a car right beside him. My wife says the man still sits there every day, staring into the same stretch of road. He doesn’t beg or drink. He just exists.
One evening, she saw three teenage boys coming out of a nearby McDonald’s restaurant, loud and laughing, full of swagger. One of them walked over to the old man and shouting at him. Then, unbelievably, he took off his shoe and began hitting the man on the head with it with, saying: “Wake up! Stop Sleeping!”.
The man whimpered softly, “Stop hurting me.”
The boy’s friends laughed - perhaps in fear, perhaps excitement. Nobody intervened. My wife was too frightened to move. When they finally walked away back into the McDonalds, the man just slumped back down and stared again at the section of road where his son had died.
That, I realised, was Ace Merrill. Same cruelty, different decade.
It’s frightening how easy it is to fall into homelessness here in America. I often watch Caleb Hammer on YouTube, where ordinary people come on to have their finances examined. Many are middle-class professionals with decent jobs who are barely one misstep away from disaster. Hammer often warns them, bluntly, that a few missed payments, one medical bill, or a layoff could push them onto the streets. And they rarely believe him. But he’s right. The gap between stability and destitution is paper-thin.
It’s no longer just an American problem. My sister, who works in property management back in Mayo, recently got a heartbreaking call from a late middle-aged woman desperately seeking an apartment in the county. She’d worked for a state agency all her life, never married, paid her taxes, lived decently. Her landlord of 12 years needed his property back. She understood and left without fuss. But she couldn’t find anywhere else to go. She lost the roof over her head, her nest, her safe-space, her home.
Now she’s living in her car - still working full-time, still showing up at her office every morning. The only emergency accommodation offered was in Charlestown, miles away from where she works.
Besides, she’s too frightened to go into a hostel, so she now sleeps in her car instead. She is traumatised, ashamed and vulnerable.
The tragedy is that people like her never imagined this could happen to them. Nor, I suspect, did that Armenian-Iranian man at the Glendale bus stop. But all it takes is a run of bad luck in modern society, an illness, a lost job, or the wrong landlord notice - and your whole life collapses.
That’s the real lesson we keep missing when we rush to label cruelty with some fashionable moral tag. Recently, I’ve heard reports of racist attacks in Ireland. People rush to declare that the country has become racist. Certainly, some of those attacks are racist. But many others come from the same place Ace Merrill came from: pure, directionless malice.
There’s a danger in how we decide what’s happening and what we attribute it to. When we frame every act of nastiness as “anti-immigrant” or “racist", we miss the point. In every society under pressure - whether the cause is housing shortages, unemployment, or social neglect - there will always be antagonism toward outsiders. Always. It doesn’t matter whether those outsiders come from Africa or Dublin, from Kyiv or Belfast. Pressure breeds hostility, feeding the anger of the worst living among us.
So as the housing market fails, as rents soar and the cost of living explodes, successive Irish governments stand idly by - failing to provide enough homes and allowing uncontrolled immigration to overwhelm services. It isn’t just the homeless who suffer. The whole social fabric tears. And into that tear seeps fear, resentment and cruelty.
Painting an entire society as racist or rotten doesn’t solve anything. It’s comforting perhaps because it gives us a simple story. But it obscures the truth. The truth is that most people are not racists. They’re anxious, squeezed and scared. They can say hurtful things. But within every community, there’s also that small minority - damaged, angry, or simply cruel - who prey on the vulnerable regardless of colour, creed, or nationality.
The real task, then, isn’t to keep inventing new moral categories, but to fix the material conditions that drive despair. Build housing - proper, large-scale, urgent housing - for the people who already live and work in Ireland. Do that first. Then and only then, can we properly welcome new arrivals and ensure they too can live with dignity. Not before.
Otherwise, we risk something far worse than political division. We risk moral exhaustion, the quiet deadening of empathy that means ordinary people turn a blind eye to the Ace Merrills of their own streets.
The United States (and the United Kingdom) voted for political solutions to problems of immigration and governmental failures long in the making. Each are now facing a different existential crisis. Ireland is surely not so far behind.
