"Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium"

Connolly juxtaposes two moral pathologies: visible illegality born of deprivation versus invisible indifference nourished by comfort. Slums may harbor crime because scarcity, overcrowding, and state neglect funnel energy into survival strategies that sometimes cross legal lines. But the contrast focuses attention on the less examined sickness of prosperity. Middle-class suburbs, organized around privacy, property, and predictability, can cultivate emotional numbness, political disengagement, and a feverish chase for status that masquerades as normalcy. Apathy becomes a civic failure: if nothing seems urgent beyond mortgage payments and school rankings, injustices elsewhere remain somebody else’s problem. Delirium names the psychological cost of this insulation, the anxious, consumerist dream that blurs reality with advertising, metrics, and curated lawns, producing restless minds in tranquil streets.

The aphorism also indicts how society assigns blame. Crime is counted, publicized, and punished; apathy is rewarded as prudence. We fund policing where deprivation concentrates, while celebrating suburbs whose very zoning excludes the poor and externalizes social risk. In that arrangement, delinquency at the margins legitimizes moral superiority at the center. Yet indifference in comfortable neighborhoods may enable more harm than the crimes they fear: policies that perpetuate inequality, voting habits that erode public goods, and a refusal to imagine common fate. Thus the spectacle of crime distracts from the quieter engines of harm: exclusionary housing, tax avoidance, environmental externalities, and cultural narratives that equate decency with distance and silence with virtue.

Read as a provocation, the line insists that safety without solidarity is a mirage. It urges attention not only to crimes of commission but to omissions, the bridges not built, the schools not funded, the empathy not exercised. The remedy is not romanticizing poverty or demonizing comfort, but recognizing that social health depends on dismantling structures that force desperate choices and on unsettling the complacency that allows those structures to endure.