Five months into my mission in Austria, I transferred to the city of Vienna. That first night in the city, Elder Nelson and I went to visit one Alfred Pitzal in Werndlegasse, which lies approximately central in the 23rd borough of the city of Vienna, just north of the Danube. From Werndlegasse, the main transport hub sits but a few hundred yards away, obscured by proximal buildings and whatever foliage survived the fact that nobody actually takes care of it. The city planners situated the hub near Werndlegasse on purpose, on the auspices that those people put into the government housing that peppers the neighborhood might have easy access to any number of transportation options from buses to streetcars to the subway to the regional trains that service the outlying areas of the city.
As we entered what Alfred referred to as his apartment, I stood in shock and awe. Alfred’s apartment measured in total 10 feet wide by 25 feet deep, with a single window at the back in his living/bedroom of what passes for a studio apartment in Vienna. Electrical and plumbing lines, added as an afterthought, ran along the ceiling, exposed to plain view, giving the ceiling an eerily industrial look. Everything was chipped, pitted, rusted, or otherwise dilapidated with age (the building being about 17 years old at the time), and everything reeked of cigarette smoke. We all sat on Alfred’s bed, seeing as how he lacked any other furniture for sitting, having besides his bedroll naught but a television and a table, which was strewn with reading material.
Granted, Alfred paid nothing for his domicile, he being a recipient of government-subsidized housing, but I could not abide the fact that, as I got to know Joseph Lamell, Dietrich Schlemmer, and other residents of the Bauhaueser as they are called how people in such an apparently affluent and civilized country could abide and endure living in such squalor. For me, it was like living in the third world.
This was not the first time I’d seen government housing and the effects that “subsistence” level prestidigitation by bureaucrats. Back in 1994 as part of a federal disaster aid relief volunteer brigade, FEMA assigned us to a neighborhood full of row houses. The people in that part of town turned us away once they found out we didn’t have money. They didn’t care about their things, their homes, or anything else unless you came with a check in hand. Despite living in one of the most prosperous and affluent countries on earth, these people preferred not to take part in the activities that made it that way, preferring instead to wait for whatever crumbs fall from the rich man’s table.
If at that time I neglected to express gratitude for my state of affairs, allow me to correct that error and tell you how much I appreciate where I live. Living and working in Austria helped me appreciate the land of my nativity and the blessings we enjoy here more than any other single experience of my life. I can only imagine how much more abject the lives of people seem in places like Somalia, Uruguay, and Micronesia, without some of the niceties and conveniences of modern life. Meeting and working with the residents of Werndlegasse made me glad to go home every night to the comfort of a clean and comfortable apartment in the 17th borough.
By and large Americans know very little about how blessed they are. Those among us considered “poor” do better than the average joe in most countries and far better than did most of our ancestors. For my own part, my pioneer ancestors eked out a living by the shore of the “Pond” among other fledgling colonies, in the swamps of Illinois, at the edge of the frontier in Missouri, and in the shadow of the Great Salt Lake. From those inauspicious beginnings, we enjoy the opulence and prosperity I know today. While others around me piss and moan about their plight, all the wealth they’ve “lost” in the down economy, I still consider myself richly blessed.
One other thing about the Werndlegasse to mention is how it came to be. During World War II, allied bombers nearly leveled much of the city of Vienna. As people flooded into the cities, the government built row housing and then apartment buildings for the abject and homeless poor. Americans today have absolutely no idea how lucky we are. The last time an enemy successfully invaded and leveled large portions of our cities was in 1812-1815. Seems we’ve already forgotten the devastation of 11 September 2001 when a handful of terrorists brought down some of our most impressive buildings, killing thousands in a few hours. We have no idea how good we have it here.
I wrote before about Great Expectations Americans have. We enjoy by far a very opulent lifestyle, and when anything threatens it, we balk, notwithstanding that our ground state rests far above the ground state of other people around the world. We forget those advertisements that run every Christmas trying to guilt trip us into sponsoring children in the third world that paint a picture of abject poverty and focus on minute perturbations in the value of our IRA. Each of us needs to spend some time with folks from a Werndlegasse. With things properly in perspective, persnickety people pass away.
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