Swarms of rats. Streets littered with human waste and heaps of trash. More than 60,000 people living on the streets. You might guess I’m describing a third world city; but no, that’s the modern day reality in the city of angels – Los Angeles, California – where Typhus, a disease spread by rats and associated with the Middle Ages, has made a comeback. With a record setting number of cases in 2018, Typhus is affecting not only the homeless, but also city officials and police officers.
Next door in Orange County, Calif., officials sought to clear out a homeless camp of 700 people – offering beds in shelters, motel vouchers, drug treatment, and job training. Liberals such as the ACLU and homeless advocates actually filed a federal lawsuit to prevent the county from taking such action. Ultimately the county prevailed, and sanitation workers in hazmat gear removed 250 tons of trash, 1,100 pounds of human waste, and 14,000 hypodermic needles.
The conditions aren’t any better up the coast in San Francisco, where local columnist Carl Nolte wrote: “The city is out of control. Traffic is a mess, but it’s rare to see a traffic control officer. … There is so much human waste on the streets of San Francisco the city formed a ‘poop patrol’ where workers are paid $71,000 a year, about same as the average school teacher.”
Yes, San Francisco’s feces problem is so bad that tourists and residents can actually get an online map to help them navigate around the piles of excrement. Discarded syringes litter the streets. Public urination is so widespread it has damaged subway elevators, escalators, buildings, and power poles. Liberal lunacy led San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system to a “brilliant” plan to combat the flood of urine in the city’s elevators. Rather than actually stopping people from urinating in elevators, the city spent $340,000 to develop a solution aptly named “Urine-B-Gone” to spray in elevators to neutralize the smell. The city spends about $2 million a year on urine and feces cleanup.
Amid California’s soaring homelessness and defiant sanctuary city polices, the crime rate in the state is soaring. Many blame the statewide Proposition 47, pushed by the Democrat Party and the ACLU, which was enacted in 2014. Under Prop 47, a vast number of “non-violent” crimes have been downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor. These include shoplifting, grand theft, fraud, and illegal drug use. Theft of anything valued under $950 is now a misdemeanor. A thief may now steal something under that limit everyday and it will never rise to felony status. In the rare event that perpetrators are actually prosecuted, the result is merely a slap on the wrist and they’re back on the streets within hours. Retailers, ravaged by shoplifting, are closing their doors. In addition, as National Review reports, “DNA samples aren’t collected from misdemeanor offenders … making it more difficult for law-enforcement agencies to solve cold cases, including those involving rape and murder.”
California can’t be bothered by such “insignificant” consequences resulting from their leftist ideology – they’re too busy banning plastic straws, plastic bags, and paper receipts. While illegal immigrants are given free healthcare by the state, California’s own citizens are abandoned by those tasked to protect and serve.
San Francisco has the highest levels of property crime in the nation, according to FBI statistics. One’s chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime is one in 14. Smash-and-grab thefts from locked cars are so common that car repair shops have waiting lists. A 2016 survey showed that 34% of Bay area residents wanted to leave.
The city that embraced free love and drugs in the ‘60s, has for decades embraced the leftist policies that flowed out of that immoral mindset. Decades of ultra-liberal policies and disdain for law enforcement has led to this blight.
In 1996 Democrat Mayor Willie Brown implemented the trifecta of liberal lunacy by instituting increased government, taxation, and regulations while eliminating ordinances against sleeping in public and blocking sidewalks. San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan – who had taught Marxist seminars and helped run the Communist club at UC Berkeley – also refused to prosecute “victimless” crimes. The DA’s resistance to take a hard line against drugs prompted dealers to flood into the city, City Journal reported.
During that same time period, Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani and police commissioner William Bratton did the opposite in New York City. Their tough on crime polices led to a significant decline in crime and blight through their implementation of the “broken windows policy,” which is the belief that by enforcing laws targeting minor crimes such as vandalism and public drinking, an atmosphere of order and lawfulness is created, thus preventing more serious crime. Now under New York’s leftist Mayor Bill de Blasio, that has all changed with petty crimes, vandalism, and homelessness rising.
America’s five most dangerous cities have been controlled by Democrat mayors for decades – in some cases more than half a century. There’s truth in the saying: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
The Left’s solutions to the concerns raised above are to either throw billions of dollars at it or, even worse, pretend it’s not a problem. Both of these ignore the underlying cause. We as a nation are quickly losing our moral underpinnings, and California is just one step ahead. As FRC’s Tony Perkins recently wrote: “Don’t think that we can have morality without religion. We’ve driven religion from our public life, and we’re shocked that we no longer have morality and we no longer value human life.” When we fail to follow the law of God, lawlessness will reign.
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