Fix It, Or We’ll Fix It For You
This is probably too simplistic an analysis, but here goes.
If you live in any city in Iowa, you are subject to laws about public safety and order. For example, you have to shovel the snow off your sidewalk within a certain number of hours after it snows, or else the city comes in and does it for you and sends you a bill. Or when you don’t mow and maintain that property, they city gives you a series of warnings before coming in and clearing out all the weeds and debris and sends you a bill.
In other words, when you don’t do your part to keep society operating, free from endangering others, government steps in whether you like it or not.
I thought of that in light of what we’ve seen this summer in Seattle and Portland…and the massive increase in shootings all year in Chicago and New York.
The federal government is now saying if you at the local level don’t take care of things, to protect all the citizens, then we’ll come in and in essence do it for you.
As we’ve learned in past natural disasters, the normal protocol is that federal officials, resources, and money only flow to states and cities after they ask for it. So the question becomes, at what point can the feds take care of a situation regardless of what the local folks want?
At this point, this close to a pivotal national election, everyone is acting in a partisan way. These cities are run by liberal Democrats who’ll be darned if they’ll let a president they despise help them, and for his part, the president is acting now as opposed to six months ago in part because of the election calendar, as well.
Regardless of all that, what most of us are seeing is a stunning lack of authority and order in the major cities in this country. And we who don’t live there can’t figure out why…but we know it has to stop, regardless of partisan squabbling.
