California is a state whose population has leaned decidedly to the Left. In 2014 its citizens passed Proposition 47 designed to alleviate crowding in the State’s prisons, reserving them for those who had committed violent crimes while being significantly less punitive in dealing with non violent offenders. The essence of that piece of legislation would seem to have been the increase from 450 to 950 dollars of the threshold beyond which a misdemeanor becomes a felony. As misdemeanors do not necessarily involve prison time, one could now, in other words, forge a check, shoplift or engage in a drug deal involving less than $950 without going to jail.
California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom was the Mayor of San Fransisco from 2004 to 2011. Its current Mayor, London Breed, is also a Democrat. The city’s District Attorney since Jan. of 2020 is one Chesa Boudin whose politics are perhaps best implied by the fact that his parents were members of the Weather Underground, a pro-communist group declared to be a terrorist organization in the Seventies. And of course San Fransisco falls within the Congressional District of Nancy Pelosi. I point all this out simply to emphasize that the conditions evident in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Fransisco on Aug. 23 when Fox News’ Laura Ingraham interviewed Tony Montoya, President of San Fransisco’s Police Officers Association, are a result of the naivete if not sheer stupidity of the “compassionate” Left.
Montoya refers to what is happening in his city as “the swiftest revolving door in the criminal justice system,” a syndrome in which criminals know that if their offenses entail less than $950, they’ll be back out on the street within hours. Reports have it that thieves are casually walking out of retail outlets even as their staffs watch. Montoya averred that some actually bring along calculators to make sure they don’t exceed their $950 limit. As Ingraham interviews him just a few yards from a Police Station, an individual can be seen wandering around in an obvious drug induced haze. When she asks Montoya how difficult it might be to acquire a little crack or heroine or fentanyl, he says it’s all right there, dealers readily available to anyone so inclined. Tents occupied by the homeless, many of whom are so as a result of their addictions, line the street behind Ingraham and Montoya. The fumes assailing them, he insists, are a combination of drugs and the excrement of those who simply can’t be bothered seeking out a public washroom. Ironically, he says, more people in his jurisdiction died of fentanyl abuse last year than of Covid 19! While one of the main side effects of that drug is shortness of breath, the Minneapolis branch of our contemporary Inquisition, in support of the Myth of Systemic Racism, chose to find Derek Chauvin rather than fentanyl solely responsible for the death of the addict George Floyd.
Predictably predisposed to a piece of legislation such as Proposition 47, various California Universities have published studies designed to validate their biases. In 2015 Stanford U. gleefully declared that the State had reduced its prison population by 13,000 while saving 150 million dollars in a single year! In 2018 the U. of California, Irvine, rationalized the obvious increase in drug abuse and “petty” crime within the state by pointing out similar trends in New York and elsewhere. Of course it failed to examine the possible co-relation between the politics of the states in question and these disturbing trends!
I cannot imagine the level of naivete if not outright stupidity of the proponents of a piece of legislation which basically tells those inclined to certain offenses that they can now double the extent of their crimes with no significant repercussions, without realizing that they are inviting a surge in criminal activity. Much of that activity, Montoya says, is committed by the same people released over and over again by their “compassionate” Democratic D.As.
To be as succinct as possible: The inclination to reduce politics to matters of Identity, [ i.e., race, gender, sexual orientation or economic status], is laughably superficial, disregard for Man’s capacity as a Conscious, Volitional agent being a crass denial of the facts of Human Nature. A person of Color vilified by Whites may be a horrible human being; I may dislike my gay neighbor not because he’s gay but because he’s an arrogant jerk; and the homeless of San Fransisco may be the products of a lifetime of bad decisions. Governments cannot possible comprehend or engineer the complexities of human behavior. “Progressive” governments, however, led by generations of “intellectuals” who have infected the general public as well, seem to have decided that life, as the revered Marx averred, is actually very simple! The rich and powerful are guilty while the poor and powerless are their innocent victims. Hence the brilliant deduction that White people in the West are “systemically racist” because they insist on defending Principles and Values which have in fact proven eminently successful in confronting the challenges of the real world. Human achievement, it would seem, has literally been demonized by the contemporary Left. Absurd!
“Progressives,” full of good intentions, never actually consider the Real World repercussions of their policies. Prop 47 is a perfect example of their naivete. Yes, crimes of violence are horrific. But the devastation wrought upon retail outlets by rampant shoplifting as well the harm done to millions by easy access to hard core drugs are equally so. The tendency to be lenient with those responsible for such transgressions, as with the reluctance of the mainstream to condemn the antics of B.L.M. and Antifa, is a product of the notion that they are all somehow the innocent victims of the Western Patriarchy, of a harsh moral regime which unfairly asks every individual to take responsibility for the arc of his or her life.
We are all subject to arbitrary factors beyond our control. Some are born to fabulous wealth, others to abject poverty; some are intellectually blessed, others not so much. The inevitable burden of every Individual is to do the best he/she can with what they have been given. It is what the last century’s Existentialists deemed a Moral Imperative. But the Left has replaced that imperative with the option of Victimization, exemption from accountability on the grounds that life has really been unfair to certain sectors of the species. In the States it has proven a recipe for more homelessness, more drug abuse, more inner city gangs, more Black kids born without fathers, and, here in Canada, more Indigenous women raped by Indigenous men ……. all this, ironically, courtesy of the “compassionate” Left!