How
To Virtue-Signal Your City Into A Slum
© Brian Cates 2020
If
you followed the American news media last summer, you've noticed an
increasing number of news stories coming from America's largest
cities that all exhibit a common theme: rampant dysfunction in
providing for public safety and health.
In
Baltimore, the eyes of the nation turned there when President
Trump singled out a member of Congress, Rep. Elijah Cummings,
for having the most crime and 'rat-infested' district in America.
Subsequent investigation turned up the facts that Cummings district
does indeed have
a notorious rat problem,
as well as huge
piles of trash
and high
crime rates.
In
Philadelphia, the eyes of the nation turned there when a violent
criminal engaged in a hours-long
armed standoff with police, in which he sent six officers to the
hospital.
Of course it turned out this was a
career criminal who shouldn't have been out in the first place.
The mayor then used the media attention garnered by this to...plead
for more gun control. Which struck a lot of people watching as being
exceedingly strange. If your criminal control isn’t working, it’s
doubtful pursuing more gun control is going to be effective.
In
Chicago, another bloody weekend unfolded in a long string of bloody
weekends. It's not exaggerating to call this city a literal war
zone. Officer Anthony Gugliemi, who handles public relations for
the Chicago Police Department, put
out a series of posts on his Twitter account
that revealed just what a farce law enforcement is currently dealing
with in that city.
On
the weekend of May 31st
– June 3, 52 people were shot in Chicago. 10 of those people died.
Meanwhile the Chicago PD apprehended 19 criminals on gun charges
and...by Monday afternoon of June 3rd,
11
of these people were already back on the street. Of that 11, 7 were
convicted felons and 6 had previous gun-related convictions on their
record.
Calling this situation a 'revolving door' doesn't quite do it
justice.
In
Portland, Oregon a
journalist
and several
other people
were assaulted on camera by an organized and violent gang of masked
thugs that are being allowed to roam around free on the city's
streets by the mayor and the chief of police.
And
in San Francisco an
incident was captured on a security camera when Ms. Paneez
Kosarianfard was violently assaulted by a homeless man.
Whereas
you and I would look at this poor fellow grabbing a woman at random
on the street while clearly in the grip of schizophrenic episode as a
clear public safety issue that needs addressing, the civil system
went to work and promptly put him right back out on the street, much
to the alarm of his victim.
It
was widely assumed – even by the victim in her media interviews –
that the judge must have seen the video of the incident in question
before making her ruling. It
now turns out this was not the case.
How dysfunctional is a court system where VIDEO of the incident
exists, but it somehow
does not make it into the courtroom?
Everybody
has compassion for the homeless, many of whom are in that condition
because of mental health problems. I’m quite certain Ms.
Kosarianfard is also someone who has compassion for the homeless.
But what Ms. Kosarianfard is primarily concerned about right now is
being able to walk about her own neighborhood without being assaulted
by a mentally ill person who really should be off the streets.
The
problems in San Francisco with the explosion of the homeless
population there, along
with other public safety issues has started to garner national
attention.
Public health officials are now throwing around fun words like
'bubonic plague' as they try to raise the visibility of this growing
crisis.
What
all of these news stories demonstrate is a breakdown of civil order.
Civil services that citizens pay for are supposed to provide order
that keep the city safe, clean and well managed. S0 why are so many
large urban cities becoming increasingly dangerous, unhealthy, and
decayed?
There
is one common trait with Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Portland
and San Francisco: they are all run by Democrat political machines
that have been in power for decades.
Philadelphia's
last Republican mayor was in the 1950's. Chicago's was in the
1930's. Baltimore's last Republican mayor left office in 1967.
Portland's was in 1980. And San Francisco's last Republican mayor
was in 1964.
It
can't be that Democrats in power in a city ipso facto causes these
problems, though. Plenty of major cities in America have had
Democrats in power for decades, and they don't have the same rampant
homeless or sanitary health problems plaguing places like San
Francisco.
Five
of the last six mayors of Dallas, Texas have been Democrats. Houston
last had a Republican mayor in 1982. The last Republican mayor in
Boston left office in 1930. Only 2 of the last 9 mayors of Phoenix
AZ have been Republican, 7 have been Democrats.
It
would seem to depend on what **kind**
of Democrats are in power in these large urban cities. In red states
such as Arizona or Texas, the Democrats who win elections would be
considered not really all that much different from Republicans in
places like San Francisco or Chicago. Not all Democrats are in the
same place on the political spectrum.
The
common theme I see at work here is that the political machines in
charge of places like Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia and
San Francisco are all far on the Left of the political spectrum.
The
further one goes to the far Left or the far Right on the political
spectrum, it's my belief that one gets further and further detached
from reality. And for this reason it's hard for the radical
extremists of the far Left or the far Right to actually come up with
workable solutions to solve urban problems when voters hand them
power by electing them into office.
As
a perfect example of what I am talking about, the current governor of
California – and former long-time mayor of San Francisco - Gavin
Newsom and his fellow political class elites are presently far more
concerned with **changing
words** used to describe convicted felons so no one's feelings get
hurt
than they are with cleaning up the unsanitary conditions and dangers
their citizens are currently facing.
What
is it that causes a political elite class to be so out of touch that
it is constantly scanning the horizon for new windmills to joust
while their cities continue to spiral out of control?
What
leads a Governor or a mayor to constantly be babbling in front of
cameras about plastic straws, global warming or how 'hurtful' the
word 'felon' is when their city is literally having feces piling up
on the sidewalks and tent cities expanding to cover new blocks?
After
decades of observing the phenomenon of city leaders ducking real
problems to spent most of their time blathering about small or
imaginary ones, I finally came across a book that perfectly
encapsulated what I was seeing.
Economist
and social theorist Thomas Sowell wrote a book entitled “Vision
of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As A Basis For Social Policy”.
In
this book, Sowell demonstrates convincingly that a predominantly
Progressive political elite class sees the crafting of social policy
chiefly as an avenue to engage in self-congratulation rather than as
a mere tool to fix problems and make improvements.
As
radical as you might find this, public safety or finding workable
solutions to problems is not the uppermost issue on the minds of the
far Leftist elite who run San Francisco or the state of California.
Their focus is on using public policy to shine the batsignal of their
own imagined moral superiority. There are real world consequences
when voters continue to make the mistake of putting people into
important jobs who don't function in the real world with the rest of
us. It's been manifest to many observers for years that the
priorities of the political class in California are way out of
kilter.
As
an example, let's look at the “compassionate” decision of the
city of San Francisco several years ago to begin allowing homeless
people to defecate and urinate in public without any consequences.
There
is not a single city, town or municipality in Texas that I am aware
of where a person who defecated in public and left their feces on the
street would not be arrested. In San Francisco, this kind of
behavior has become so common that a
social media app now exists
that allows the user to see where all the current piles of feces have
been allowed to accumulate on the streets.
When
you celebrate and even encourage a breakdown in civil society by not
punishing anti-social behavior, you will end up getting far more of
it. So when the authorities in San Francisco made the decision to
no longer punish people for defecating in public, they were tacitly
assenting to a breakdown in the civil order. Once you've opened that
door in one place, it's awfully hard to ever get that particular door
closed again...and to keep other doors from opening elsewhere.
Before
you take a fence down, you need to fully understand why it was built
and placed there to begin with. San Francisco took the fence down,
and is only now coming to grips with the consequences.
Now
the homeless and sanitation problems have grown to such immense
proportions the usual methods and excuses used to hide or deflect
from how bad the problems really are no longer work.
Like
taking hundreds of the homeless people in your city and giving them a
one-way bus ticket out of town, for instance.
Recently
when pressed on the homeless issue Governor Newsom made the
absurd claim that much of California’s homeless problem is due to
the state of Texas busing it’s homeless to places like San
Francisco.
As
any real research into this issue will demonstrate, Newsom has it
exactly backwards; large urban areas that cannot control their
homeless populations started busing them into the heartland states
long ago. California
has been giving hundreds of homeless persons one-way bus tickets
to other states such as Texas for years now. Records show more than
21,000 homeless people were bused from one place to another in the US
from 2011 to 2017.
Instead
of fixing their own city’s broken social policies and laboring to
restore civil order, the far Left politicians opted to use busing the
homeless out of town as a safety valve. Nobody has to admit they
were wrong or change the bad policies they put into place, and so no
one's feelings got hurt. The problem was kept at a manageable level
for a few years longer this way.
But
the scandal that San Francisco now faces is that the homeless
population has grown to such massive proportions that busing a couple
hundred of these poor souls out of town to other locales no longer
suffices.
I
recently did a
column for The Epoch Times
in which I wrote about the fact that in the United States there
hasn’t been a coherent policy in dealing with mentally ill people
for some time now. There was a movement to push
de-institutionalization of the mentally ill beginning in the 1950’s
that has now led to this current situation in which the streets of
America’s large urban cities are now crowded with people who really
should be in some type of managed care facility.
Things
are now in such a sad state in the United States when it comes to
dealing with the mentally ill who are homeless where cities are just
sending them back and forth on buses with one way tickets to nowhere.
This has got to change.
The
final factor in why this absurd and intolerable situation continues
is that there is a class factor in play here. The political elite
class is literally walled off from the rest of the community in these
urban cities. All these city officials live in gated communities
with armed guards and I assure you all the civil services in their
ritzy neighborhoods are working just fine. The trash gets picked
up like clockwork, and nobody is leaving piles of their feces or
dirty needles on the sidewalk in Pacific Heights or Nob Hill.
The
noble elite anointed ones leave these gated communities in the
morning, driven in limousines to their important jobs at city hall,
where they spend most of their time absorbed in virtue-signaling
minutiae before being driven home again to the safety of their
manors. And nothing really changes or gets better for the people on
the streets.
Until
voters wake up, these same people living in their own gated bubbles
will keep on endlessly signaling their precious virtue and focusing
on the windmills on the horizon as the feces and the dirty needles
and the homeless tent cities cover more and more of these
communities. Conditions in these cities will continue to deteriorate
until new leadership is placed in charge.
That's
the brutal truth.
