Don’t dare be different

Sam Shipkovitz came home late one evening to the swank Waterford House high-rise condominium building on Crystal Drive, where he'd lived for eight years, to find the door to his unit bolted shut. A bright yellow fire marshal's condemnation placard was fastened over the peephole: "Unfit for Human Habitation."

There is a newly reconstituted hoarding task force in Arlington. And in an increasingly dense urban environment, officials say, there is simply no room for what may have been overlooked in the past as eccentric collecting.

These stories keep surfacing around the world. A few months ago a Sydney woman was forced to resign mid candidate pre-selection for a major political party. Her sin – she was a junk collector and the forces of the law had finally caught up with her.

Amid blazing publicity, she was hauled into court to make her clear her suburban property of hoarded junk. Like Shipkovitz, she was not a nutter, she just had problems letting go of things.

Friends helped her clear her property, but her political ambitions were left on the junk heap too.

In England a hermit, Stephen Grendon, has lost his fight to call his home a house after a High Court judge in London refused to rule that the single-room building - that has no running water or toilet facilities - is a 'house' in the eyes of the law.

The ruling means Grendon now faces being kicked off the land he owns.

That’s it folks, fit in, be a good housekeeper or ship out. But surely these type of people are following an inbuilt need, one that can no longer be tolerated in an orderly society.

The imperative to conform is so great that society now turns, viciously, on anyone who does not measure up.

I seem to recall, many years ago, American folk singer Pete Seeger had something of a hit with a song called ‘little boxes’. It was Seeger’s warning, but the message obviously passed over the heads of the dills who thought it was just a fun children’s song.

The warning is more real than ever: if we expunge from acceptable society, all who refuse to conform we will end up with a bland, worthless society. But then I guess it will be easier to hide our own inadequacies among everyone else’s.