Fifty-One: Bum Fights (10-05-2023)
An activist class Brooklyn yuppie was stabbed to death. His girlfriend watched helplessly. An HIV positive journalist was shot to death in a drug dispute at his front door. Another journalist was killed in what so far seems to be a robbery gone wrong. In the span of seventy-two hours, three well-to-do young, white, starry eyed exemplars of (lukewarm) liberal politics died in the cities they advocated for.
Cue the sad violins. Or the parade fanfare. Conservative commenters march about, not quite celebrating the death of people they ultimately only disagreed with, because these people had a less blunt approach to problems. It's funny when someone from a quiet suburb is so openly obsessed with the state of the inner city, and so vehemently disgusted with the policies of its activist class, that they will be jovial in response to the death of their fellow countrymen.
This is not to say that lax criminal policy, abundant "safe" injection sites, or expansion of welfare is an unquestionable solution to multi-faceted social issues. Political discourse is always black and white, either exterminate the poor and homeless, or wash them with cash and service until they miraculous reform into executives and mathematicians. Credit is due to all those who care enough to pursue an issue, regardless of their chosen solution, though compromise and deliberation is impossible.
Another humorous truth, a quiet underpinning to all debate of "out-of-control" cities, is that most cities are not very dangerous. It is true that the west coast has been deurbanized and its urban centers dehumanized in novel ways, I've seen as much first hand. The east coast (beast coast) is doing just fine in comparison. There are high rates of crime, there are high rates of poverty, and there very much are unprecedent rates of antisocial behavior. In all summation, the city is an expose of the actual state of human being. Liberal safe-spacers much enjoy to bury their heads in the sand, fleeing from even the redacted video of a murder by stabbing, and conservatives much enjoy to flesh out a mind palace of Aryan utopia where no crime exists and no punishment is necessary. And everyone is white.
But for either side to point fingers and accuse the other of heartlessness, whether for sympathizing or forgiving a violent deranged criminal, or cheering for the ironic death of an accusedly pro-crime political opponent, is useless. Not forgiving a criminal is no moral disqualification, nor is wishing for harsh justice. There's no right or wrong when the criminal is legitimately insane. The sympathy olympics on the left has led too many to believe there is not limit at which a person is no longer able to be saved, reformed, medicated to cured, and returned into a productive liberal society, or commune.
The flowers-and-laughter, community garden approach doesn't work when there's exceptions for some crazy people. The tradcath-technofuture works great basking in this hypocrisy. There's a failure by the left here, to cede to an opponent the liberty to hold economically and socially useless people in low esteem and, rather than consider any meaningful address to the issue, debate the issue ad nauseum.
Every urban person has encountered a crazy homeless person. It's true, too, that most chronic homeless don't want to be housed. There's a freedom on the streets, a nomad lifestyle and a self-governance outside of the common system, and a lot of drugs. Most people who've ever experienced homelessness were only without a home of their own for a single day. Car sleeper Amazon employees and couch-surfing bohemians are not in any sense comparable to tranq-tweaked schizzed-up street dwellers. Sticking the latter group in greasy shelters or tidying them away in safe-shoot centers is a band-aid atop a necrosis wound. The puss leaks out.
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I do, in a faithful way, want these people to be saved from their circumstances. But there is no hope in dumping more cash into the social-welfare-industrial-complex when the end goal is the societal salvation of some million street urchin homeless. Society failed these people, and is no longer equipped to save them. There's no point chasing a ghost. Fixing the pipeline is a better use of time, funneling money towards programs that prevent homelessness like, jobs programs, public construction projects, and desubsidization of suburbs (the biggest funnel of money from economically productive cities to economically draining sprawl).