What’s the opposite of Bigfoot, a hairy loner that lives in the woods and avoids people (but loves grainy, out-of-focus trail cams)? Probably not pathological hoarders, but maybe that’s close: they can’t get away from their meddling relations and the government, which imperiously demands their children not live in homes covered in old Chinese newspapers and rat feces. The gall!
Unlike our elusive, hirsute woodland friend, these folks have the opportunity to bask in the limelight—of shame. If reality television serves any useful social function (debatable), it’s that it occasionally shames mentally-scarred weirdos, making the rest of feel better about ourselves in the process.
At least, I always suspected that was the point of shows with hoarders and morbidly obese people (I wonder how big—no pun intended—of an overlap there is between those disorders?) was for us to shake our heads and thank God we aren’t as screwed up as those people. As Audre Myers gently implies here, we’re all screwed up (true), and but for the Grace of God, we’d be holding onto broken baseball bats and takeout flyers.
I also can’t criticize Hoarding Americans too much, as my natural inclinations towards packrattery and a weird holdover Depression/Recession Era mentality make me loathe to waste anything—or to let too much go. I’m especially that way with books, so when I successfully donated a massive cardboard box of old books to the local library, I took it as a good sign that I am not a hoarder, just a slob. Shew!
All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We all need grace and compassion—even the hoarders.
With that, here is Audre’s review of the A&E series Hoarders:
The Portly Politico 