The Policeman Is My Daddy

I've been a James Lileks fan as long as I've been blogging. He's a daily blogger and a writer for many sites. He recently penned this piece about his home town of Minneapolis descending into chaos. Here's the tidbit of interest for me.

How can this area be commercially inert? Especially since it was once full of interesting stores, a real community with a corner grocery store.

It was teetering before 2020, and the riots just cleaned it out. Then came the miscreants. Strib:

Landlords have worked with the community and police to address public safety. Since the riots in 2020, Uptown has also been the site of repeated "intersection takeovers" by street racers.

Every one of these should have been broken up immediately with arrests and citations.

Note that his first and only line of defense are the police. The newspaper, at least, makes some mumbling mention of "the community," but that's just a made-up term beloved by social-justice types when they need a new word to describe a race and they've used all the other synonyms in the previous two paragraphs.

James goes on to describe how the locals are discussing the urban decay on Reddit.

Over at Reddit at r/minneapolis they're mostly debating whether the reasons are Guns / Racism / Poverty / Underfunded Schools / COVID, or a different combination of the five elements, each of which has its own ability to rewire morality and behavior in ways that cannot be undone by one's individual agency.

None of this reflects the mechanics of real life. It's all just progressive jibber-jabber. Tell me, when you misbehaved as a kid, what was it that set you straight? 

1. Was it new gun-control laws? 
2. How about Ibram Kendi getting Democrat politicians to put on their kente cloths and kneel down again? 
3. Maybe it was a check for $150 from HHS, delivered to your mom. 
4. When your teacher got a raise, did you repent of your sins? 
5. Or was it when you got an inoculation for a disease you didn't understand and couldn't even spell?

Seriously, pick one. It must have been one of those five options because that's all we discuss these days, even good, clean conservatives like James Lileks. He, at least would add this one.

6. Cops arresting you and throwing you in the hoosegow.

The first five options are part of the statist fantasy we're living in and the sixth isn't even vaguely scalable. This is something we've discussed before on this blog. In that particular case, it was about finding mentors for kids in Baltimore, but the design of the perpetual motion machine we're trying to build is the same.

Now think about the task of the mentor. Amanda tells us that the kids are working on survival and school is a secondary concern at best. The mentor isn't only there to tutor, they are there to provide security, money, love and discipline.

If you think there is any chance at all that you will be able to find 6600 people, unrelated to the students, who are going to have the time, energy, know-how and willingness to take on that task, please contact your local mental hospital and schedule a straight-jacket fitting session.

There is a solution, however. Like I said in yesterday's post, those mentors are out there. We just have to be willing to demand they do the job.

I know where we can find the necessary volunteers to act as mentors for the kids. Mom's bed. The men found therein can be given a special title. We'll call them "husbands." We can give them a special token of appreciation. Maybe it could be a ring they could wear. We could also give them a certificate acknowledging their volunteer status. We'll call that a "marriage license."

That is the only solution to the problem. There is no other. All of the screaming about flags and statues and white supremacists and Trump and Tucker Carlson and the far-right and the alt-right is simply irrelevant noise. It's like blaming leprechauns for the suffering of these kids.

Just a few more episodes like this and Minneapolis will be as right as rain.