A Common Identity

A columnist for the N.Y. Old Bag asks why is a guy who’s been dead for six years a top issue in American life? The man who is asking writes with forked pen. He should know, as it’s his rag that’s putting a nonissue on its front page every day. The nonissue covers for the total breakdown of civil behavior in large American cities, a breakdown due to mostly young black and Hispanic thugs. Lefty politicians opposed to Trump’s illegal-immigration crackdown are openly encouraging assaults on cops, ICE agents, and other government officers. Law enforcement agents are now seen as Nazis and the Gestapo after months of Democrat politicians calling them such names. Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles seem at times to be war zones, with once-beautiful residential neighborhoods now taken over by homeless tents and drugs.

I’ve been thinking about how wonderful American cities used to be when I was young. The first time I went to Los Angeles at 20 years of age, I thought I had landed in paradise: glistening streets, beautiful buildings, mom-and-pop stores, quiet beaches, no crowds, and virtually no crime, along with blue skies and greenery. Today El-Lay is skid row, with open drug markets, tent cities where the homeless lay down the rules, private homes of the rich turned into forts defended by armed guards, and gang violence an everyday happening. Enforced diversity has yet to save a city. Chicago violence, I am told, is even worse.

“Totally different value systems from your own do not make for a peaceful country.”

When I first laid eyes on New York as I was landing aged 11, I thought that it must be a dream. After years of war, Europe lay in ruins, whereas the Big Bagel seemed to have burst out of the sea in its splendor and magnificence. Fifth Avenue, Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State, Broadway—all were a long way from the blown-up buildings and ruined city of Athens.

So what happened? Ted Kennedy’s 1965 immigration law limiting white European influx, and encouraging unlimited third-world immigration, is what happened. Need I say more? In the Big Bagel, the 300,000 public employees compete for who among them will bark the loudest and be the rudest where the public is concerned. I would say 99 percent are minorities. Once upon a time American informality was welcome; now it’s a bruising everyday experience.

Oh, for the days when tradition rather than reform was the best influence on the quality of citizenship. A common identity is all-important in a society of strangers, a concept that is rejected by liberals and lefties in the name of globalism. Man is free but also bound by moral standards. When the black family imploded sometime in the ’60s, egged on by the liberals and the left, few realized the damage it would do to blacks. I remember some know-it-all football commentator laughing and praising some black player for having twelve or thirteen children, most of whose names he didn’t even know. Well, young blacks without fathers do have a tendency to get into drugs and do bad things to others and to themselves, but our lefty know-it-alls thought otherwise. This is why blacks make up almost 14 percent of the population but constitute more than 55 percent of the prison population.

The great Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas and other such American blacks—dismissed by the usual suspects as Uncle Toms—were among the first to see this but were shouted down by the media and the left, who appreciated con-men phonies like Al Sharpton and praised gangsters like the recently departed Rap Brown as black heroes. The latter just had his obituary covering a whole page in the Old Bag, his murder of a policeman mentioned as an aside.

The American public is now so stupefied by those contraptions everyone holds and looks at nonstop every minute of the day and night, their ability to pay attention or focus on anything not trivial is astounding. Technology has made humans stupider by the minute, and no one has become more stupid than American youths. And it gets worse.

Like Sweden, once the most civilized country of Europe, now among the most violent due to open borders for Middle Easterners and Africans, the U.S. has welcomed all sorts of foreign criminals, the latest an Afghan who murdered a 20-year-old National Guardswoman in cold blood. Totally different value systems from your own do not make for a peaceful country. Minnesota is now littered with unruly Somalis breaking the law but being protected by laws that state one is innocent until proved guilty. Go figure, as they used to say in Brooklyn.

This article was originally published on Taki’s Magazine.

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