The last thing most progressive politicians will tell you is the following. The break-down of civilization is spreading like a cultural virus. It can be seen most acutely in cities governed by progressives. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, New York, Chicago among other cities are taking on the appearance of the third world. There are pockets of enormous wealth, growing poverty, crime, a shrinking middle class and unscreened illegal immigrants in unsustainable numbers crossing the border unrestrained. A general sense of lawlessness prevails. People are told not to wear expensive jewelry when they are out and to be on high alert as they navigate once safe streets. Children traverse filthy streets dodging vagrants, human waste and hypodermic needles on their way to school.
What has driven the societal breakdown? Law enforcement, that had maintained that fragile barrier separating civilization and barbarism, has been torn down by mayors, city councils and prosecutors who misperceive criminals as victims. Not only are basic laws not enforced but arrested criminals are back on the streets in a day or once sentenced released early. One violent crime after another is committed by criminals with long rap sheets.
What started as a slow burn more than 20 years ago has flared into a conflagration raging on the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles among other left-wing governed cities. The same kind of lawlessness is building in our precious San Diego.
Taxpayer dollars have been misspent, wrongly assuming the problem is a shortage of affordable housing. In California tens of billions of dollars have been wasted. Two of the world’s great cities look more like Tijuana 50 years ago then the crown jewels of the once Golden State. Seventy-thousand drug addicts and psychotics command the streets from down-town L.A. to the beach and over the hills into the Valley. Much the same can be said about San Francisco and in a milder form in San Diego. With each passing week we can see the disease of lawlessness metastasizing.
The prosperity and opportunities brought by the oil, tech, finance, manufacturing and entertainment industries are looking elsewhere to do business. Basking in sunshine increasingly takes a backseat to the disease of social decay and unaffordability.
Problems on this scale don’t happen overnight. Tragically they can’t be easily repaired. Twenty years ago, I was driving back to San Diego from Little Tokyo. I passed the L.A. Rescue Mission. Four or five square blocks around the Mission were overflowing with vagrants, drug-addicts, prostitutes and the mentally ill. They probably numbering in the hundreds. City councils, mayors and prosecutors saw fit to stop enforcing the laws that prohibit people from pooping, urinating, open drug use and camping on the streets. It should be no surprise that the numbers have exploded to 70,000 and growing.
Elected officials and candidates for office pledge to fix the problems. In all cases those pledges represent arrogance or lies. It will take years to fix the crime explosion and decades to fix homelessness. The problem is one of cultural acceptance of lawlessness and permissiveness under the banner of victimhood fueled by an absence of standards of behavior. I am afraid it will have to get much worse before the citizens in these progressive enclaves understand that the solutions that they countenance make everything worse. Governor Newsome promised he had the answers as mayor of San Francisco in 2004. His formula has been tested for the better part of 18 years. Failure is the only way one can describe the implementation of his polices. His rhetoric, like so many of his progressive allies, has shamelessly gone unchanged.
Until those in charge are willing to forcibly place criminal and troubled people in jail or mental hospitals things will not get better. There probably are some few on the street because of a financial catastrophe. Those people can take advantage of a myriad of public and private sources of free assistance that are already in place. But criminals, the mentally ill and drug addicts will not willingly cooperate. For them a forced choice between hospitalization or jail is the only answer that can protect the innocent and save our civilization from further break-down. I am afraid this is the ugly truth, to date unacknowledged.