American Thinker

America's last mile

I think it's time to leave The City.

I'm talking about not just Minneapolis, even as we watch it die in real time.  There are NYC, so corrupt that it leaves its elderly and other useless eaters to die in place, and Chicago, with a South Side so deadly that decent black people are leaving, after the whites of a generation ago.  There are Baltimore, Detroit, Oakland — they're gone — and San Francisco and Los Angeles, too, both of which are approaching a civic point of no return.  Even Texas cities like Austin and Dallas are beset by growing crime and homeless culture, the deadly fruits of progressivism.

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams talks about the "fog of the last mile" that falls eventually at the end stage of societal problems like racism.  White people were the problem, he says bluntly, so white people went to war to cure it; they joined with civil rights greats to change the legal structure of racism as well as to pass new laws to abolish later segregation.  Yet racism persists, as we watch for seven agonizing minutes as George Floyd is killed.  And then we watch the expected rage and violence and the mad glee of looters, then the ritual burning of the American flag for the camera.  Now white people in Minneapolis are joining in the mayhem, too; why not?  Everybody's doing it, and the cops are racists!

The public has been groomed since the late '60s to accept this narrative.  The authorities will stand down, the folks will be allowed to get it out of their system, and ineffectual but well meaning leaders will plead for peace.  The looters will get lots of free TVs.  Ten years later, the street will be a burnt out empty scar on the city.

Not mentioned in the narrative is who runs these cities, or who is paying for the outsiders to come in and fan the flames, or even the leaders like Michelle Obama, who famously called black voters "our folks."  Does that ethnic voting bloc, should that bloc, even exist?  Decent black people have nothing in common with these looters, the same as I have nothing in common with the white policeman who held George Floyd down on the pavement.

Finally, I can no longer countenance the crocodile tears of these feckless big-city mayors who do nothing to improve the lot of their citizens but keep them hooked on racial resentment and welfare.  Progressives, mostly Democrats, have ruled these cities for decades.  It's time for accountability.  Perhaps Mr. Trump has the courage or bravado to hold them to it.  If so, I hope his aides advise him well and write the speech I know only he would have the guts to give.

The truth is that no one knows what to do in the last mile; we're all a bit in a fog about that.  All that hope-and-change and 1970s-style black activism didn't change much.  None of that worked to stop killings and poverty and drug abuse, did it?

At this point, I would rather listen to a Kanye West than any of the black leaders who have no answer as to why it all did not work.  The media will mock Kanye, and the black ruling class call anyone else who dares to talk this way demeaning names.  I say, until we do figure out what we are doing wrong, until we admit that this version of governance is not an accident, we might as well put the house up for sale before everyone else does and move somewhere sane.