The Washington Post‘s Stephanie McCrummen has written a powerful, even shocking, feature profiling the people with whom Emanuel AME mass killer Dylann Roof was living before he committed his crime. With a steady accumulation of details and dialogue, McCrummen paints a dark portrait of poor people who fell through the cracks, and who are going nowhere. They spend their broken lives in an anesthetic haze in a South Carolina trailer. These young men are useless. Won’t hit a lick at a snake, but sit around the trailer smoking and playing video games while their harried mother works as a Waffle House waitress. Excerpts:

A neighbor named Christon Scriven comes in and lays next to Justin. Christon, who is black, also knew Roof and says of him, “I still love him as a friend.” Then comes a friend they call J. Boogie, and a tattooed guy they call Gizmo, who sits on the carpet. A brown cigarette is rolled, lit and passed around.

“Joey!” Christon calls into the living room. “You’re stupid!”

Justin laughs and falls in and out of sleep. Gizmo stumbles to the mattress, drops and sleeps, and after a while, Christon says, “I have no sympathy for people. Nobody has any sympathy for me. I care for me and me only.”

He passes the cigarette to Justin, and Justin drops ashes in the bed, and in the chemical-smelling haze, Christon plays a country song on his phone. “Well I caught my wife with a young man and it cost me 99,” he and Justin sing.

He switches to Lil Wayne. “Family first, you get your family killed,” he and Justin rap, and the dogs start barking.

“The police here?” Christon says. Justin looks up. Joey comes in and looks through the blinds. Nothing. Christon aims a finger at him — “Bang,” he whispers — and Joey leaves.

“Joseph!” Christon yells after him.

“Hey!” Justin calls.

“Somebody! Anybody!” Christon yells, but nobody answers. Soon Justin is asleep again, and Christon is looking at him. He rubs the back of his hand on Justin’s cheek. He takes a lighter and flicks it at Justin’s hair.

Gizmo wakes up, goes to the kitchen, gets a bottle of syrup and squeezes it into his mouth.

It is nearly sundown when Kim comes home after being out all day.

“She’s here!” Jacob yells, and he gets up to make a frozen pizza.

Kim yanks up a crumpled hamburger wrapper off the floor. She grabs two plastic cups filled with cigarette butts and empties them into the garbage.

“Jacob!” she snaps when he drops the pizza carton on the floor. “Pick up that trash! Pick it up now!”

He picks it up.

“I’m so tired of these people over here, all day, every day,” Kim yells to no one. “I have no peace! I have no quiet!”

She goes into her bedroom on the other side of the trailer and shuts the door.

More, after Kim’s shift ends at the Waffle House:

After 2 a.m., it is quiet again, and she sits at the counter to eat a plate of scrambled eggs.

Two waiters, a young man and a young woman, are talking.

“I’m one drop away from killing everyone,” he says.

“My last day at McDonald’s I wanted to kill everyone,” she says.

“I can’t kill myself, because then I’d go to hell, so I’m stuck here,” he says, and fake punches her in the arm. She flinches.

“I’m very sensitive,” she says.

“I’m going to go home. Watch TV,” he says.

“No one cares,” she says. “I need a hug.”

He holds up a large steak knife and smiles. She winces and laughs weakly, and Kim finishes eating, drops the heavy plate in the sink and, three hours later, goes back to the trailer to see what is waiting for her there.

What is waiting is more of the same.

“You see that?” Lindsey says one day, looking through the blinds, the dogs barking. “They stopped in the driveway — a white Jeep,” she says, but the white Jeep leaves, and she goes back to scrolling on her cellphone.

Another day, Justin is playing Xbox, grenades exploding, bodies flying, and he says, “Mom, when did Shane die?”

“Why bring up that subject?” Jacob says, pacing, sleeves flopping. “Why?”

Another day, Kim goes into her bedroom, closes the door, smokes a cigarette and says, “It’s like we’re being punished for something, only I can’t figure out what.”

Read the whole thing. It’s important.

What stands out to me is that Kim and her sons had a normal middle-class life, until her second husband left, and sent her spiraling into poverty. Then one of the boys dropped out of high school, and the other started cutting himself. Notice, though, that she has no sense of agency, no sense that she has any control over her life. Neither, obviously, do her sons.

Second, the complete stasis of this life this motley band lead is alien to me. I guess that’s what it means to be culturally middle class: you believe that you are going somewhere, that you have a mission. Even if things blow up on you, you have faith that getting out of the ditch is possible, so you keep trying. This family has given up. Notice that I’m talking about a cultural mindset, not material conditions.

Does anybody really believe that there is a political solution to the problems that these people have? I’m not saying that government has the right to wash its hands of their fate, but I’m saying that there are no policies that can break the mental shackles that keep these people chained to that miserable trailer, smoking cigarettes and dope, playing XBox, and wasting their lives in dependence on the hard-working mother. You could write this family a check for a million dollars, and it wouldn’t fix what’s broken inside them, and in their community.

What could? Serious question.

What stands out to me is the barely-stifled rage of the Waffle House employees. What stands out to me is that Kim’s boys do not know how to be men.

UPDATE: I missed this Associated Press story from late July:

Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor and loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration’s emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to “rebuild ladders of opportunity” and reverse income inequality.

Hardship is particularly on the rise among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy “poor.”

“I think it’s going to get worse,” said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend, but it doesn’t generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.

“If you do try to go apply for a job, they’re not hiring people, and they’re not paying that much to even go to work,” she said. Children, she said, have “nothing better to do than to get on drugs.”

And:

Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures, according to the General Social Survey, which is conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America.

The divide is especially evident among those whites who self-identify as working class: 49 percent say they think their children will do better than them, compared with 67 percent of non-whites who consider themselves working class.

In November, Obama won the votes of just 36 percent of those noncollege whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since 1984.

Some Democratic analysts have urged renewed efforts to bring working-class whites into the political fold, calling them a potential “decisive swing voter group” if minority and youth turnout level off in future elections.

“They don’t trust big government, but it doesn’t mean they want no government,” says Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who agrees that working-class whites will remain an important electoral group. “They feel that politicians are giving attention to other people and not them.”

Trump voters, a lot of them.

UPDATE: Irenist writes:

What part of this story is “shocking”?

Other than the part about trailers (less common in the Northeast), this excerpt strikes me as tons of people I knew as a kid who were from my own welfare / living off of disability / minimum-wage-job demographic of lower class white people. I happen to have been blessed to be a bookish sort who was able to read my way out of that and into college and law school, but I still know plenty of guys from back home of the “smoke weed and play Xbox all day while living in squalor and living off your girlfriend’s money” approach to living, who seem to have no willpower or gumption at all. For example, when I was a little kid, our rental was next door to a white guy who spent his days messing around with his motorcycle and supported himself by pimping his wife out. Their kids (my age) used to walk around barefoot and shirtless in shorts, in the snow, because the adults in their life were all too high to notice. Maybe I’m just jaded, but, hasn’t lower class life for people of any color *always* been like this? What’s the shocking part here?

And the murderous rage of the guys at the mom’s job isn’t at all uncommon, either. I remember when I was in one of the poorer stretches of my young adulthood, I rented a room in a flea-ridden house from a rather unscrupulous live-in landlord. As I recall, on the first floor were a bunch of white people: there was a very irascible war vet who kept a lot of guns in his room, a mother (7-11 cashier) and her elementary-aged son sharing a bed in another, the landlord, and me). In the basement were a couple from Puerto Rico–a drug dealer and his wife the retired prostitute. In the closet next to the washer and dryer was a Puerto Rican-American paroled pedophile sleeping on a mattress that filled the closet from wall to wall.

As you can imagine, the mom was really angry when the pedophile moved in. But the landlord told her that he could rent her room easier than the closet, so if she didn’t like it she could leave. She didn’t have a car, and the house was in walking distance of the 7-11, so she stayed, and just forbade her son to leave their locked room unaccompanied anymore. (In retrospect, I should’ve called the police, perhaps. But I was too dumb at the time to know that.)

Anyhow, the pedophile walked home in the snow one night from his graveyard shift at McDonald’s to find that the drug dealer had been listening to the fancy stereo the pedophile kept at the foot of his mattress (he had told me when I gave him a ride to work one night that he was spending a big chunk of his wages on the rental for the speakers from a layaway place: they were his pride and joy). So of course, when he got home, he and the dealer had a knife fight about the dealer touching the stupid speakers, they both got a bit cut up, and they made up a few days later.

Not that long after, the irascible war vet brandished a gun at the mom: I think he was mad about her taking too long in the bathroom or something?

I got a better job and moved out shortly after that, but as I recall these folks fought like that all the time. So do lots of other working and welfare class people I’ve known. I once stopped one adult family member from stabbing another during a heated argument when I was a kid: that sort of thing happens not infrequently in those circles. It’s a hard life that makes people grumpy, a lot of them have poor impulse control, and fights break out.

But again, hasn’t lower class life always been lived on the edge of violence? Hogarth’s “Gin Lane,” the mob riots in Constantinople between blue and green supporters at the hippodrome, that sort of thing? Maybe I’m too low-class to notice, but what’s the shocking part here? Honestly asking.

@Charles Cosimano:

We allow them to live in a trailer instead of carving them up for transplant parts. For that small mercy let them be grateful.

Whaddaya mean “we,” Kemosabe? These are human beings we’re talking about here. No group, not even us white trash, deserves you making jokes like that. Your little ruthless evil guy act is cute, but you are, and not for the first time, crossing a line, IMHO. With respect, please knock it off. I can happily get through the day without imagining the likes of you cutting up my mom, sister, and me for transplant parts just because we were on welfare, thanks very much. You get upset when a remark seems to you to implicate your wife. So please understand that “at least ‘we’ don’t cut up your mom for her organs” does not strike me as acceptable commenter etiquette.