Inside the Liberal Mind: Urban Decay & Resignation

In “The Vials of Washington Square“, John Carney relates the story of how his mother led a successful crusade in the mid-1980s to take-back Washington Square Park from drug dealers. At that time, the park had become a central place of distribution for crack cocaine and many other illegal substances and ordinary citizens did not walk much past the park’s periphery for fear of being accosted by dealers, addicts, or worse.

My parents moved into our apartment at 32 Washington Square West in 1975. Over the next decade we watched as an army of dealers and their customers took over the heart of Greenwich Village. As a kid, I knew you didn’t ride your bicycle into the park, because a junkie would take it from you. 

Slow but sure urban decay is a hallmark of Liberal policies and fantasies made manifest. Not only does Liberal leadership destroy civilized living, it also promotes a cancerous form of resignation to the fates of misery and degradation — a toxic defeatism that crushes the spirit and consigns millions to a seemingly permanent gray sky.

The park’s arch, built as an imitation of the Arc de Triomphe, was covered in graffiti. When the city painted over it in 1981, Mayor Ed Koch applied the last stroke of white paint, then remarked, “That’ll last about an hour.”

That remark is the quintessential Liberal mind at work: defeated, even in a position of leadership, and no doubt blind to his own contribution to such a miserable state of affairs.

The Arch, Trapped Inside the Liberal Mind

The Liberal is the arsonist who congratulates himself on sounding the alarm, indulges himself with a front row seat to the horror, blames others for the blaze, and then declares the fire inevitable and uncontrollable. Throughout the entire process, the Liberal will have you believe that he is an innocent bystander and yet also the redeemer: follow him and he will lead you out of the rubble. Never mind that he took the shining city and turned it into rubble (a script Barack Hussein Obama is following perfectly).

The Arch in the Time of Giuliani

Enter Rudy Giuliani, Mayor of New York from 1992 – 2000. All the things the Liberal said could not be done, he did. He dramatically reduced crime and pursued policies that led to a city-wide renaissance, even in derelict areas such as Times Square. Whatever Rudy’s failings as a Presidential candidate, he will forever be the man who tamed the “ungovernable” city and made it beautiful for millions of residents and millions of visitors. He harnessed the spirit of Carney’s mother and took back the city block by block.

Doing so was not a gentle affair: he challenged in court the so-called free speech rights of panhandlers who intimidated helpless subway riders 10,000 times a day (have you ever sat in a subway car and had someone who claimed to have a terminal disease walk past you with a hand thrust under your nose for a donation, day after day, year after year? I have), and he won. The unspoken relief for millions of people was palpable: I can go to work without fear and without being assaulted. I can go to school without fear and without being assaulted.

The city of Chicago experienced a similar beautification during the same time period, led by its mayor, Richard Daly.

Not so in San Francisco. The only renaissance there was for the homeless and mentally ill, whose elevation over decades to a kind of principate has proceeded without interruption. In San Francisco, the panhandler is king, and you are his subject. You dare to talk back? You dare to refuse his entreaties? He is the righteous, and you are the damned.

There is a fountain there whose condition symbolizes the Liberal mind perfectly. It is part of the United Nations Plaza and has a sculpture in its center composed of seven slabs of stone that are meant to symbolize the harmony of the seven continents.

Sculpture to elevate the spirit, or public bathroom?

But the designer didn’t realize his sculpture was to be infected by a city that is perhaps the ground zero of Liberalsm, and that the stone slabs and fountain would therefore find another purpose: that of a public toilet and bath area even during the booming 1990s when San Francisco was awash in money.

[1999] A Department of Public Works street cleaner said hypodermic needles, broken glass, feces and vomit are often found in and around the fountain area. One sweeper said he recently scooped up six needles in one trip through the plaza. <source>

[2003] San Francisco’s United Nations Plaza is a landmark in crisis — overrun by drug dealers, drunks and homeless people. <source>

Those who understand the Liberal mind will not be surprised to learn that while Giuliani was restoring New York, every attempt in San Francisco to clean up the UN Plaza and its sculpture was met with furious protests about ‘driving the homeless away’. By 2005, the Mayor confirmed for us exactly where the Liberal mind resides:

United Nations Plaza is getting a $1.5 million face-lift… The idea, Newsom said, is not to chase the homeless away, but to welcome them — and tourists, residents and everyone else — to a healthy, vibrant environment that anybody can enjoy. <source>

I don’t blame you if you have to read that sentence a few times to believe it. And yet there it is, right from the San Francisco Chronicle.

So yes, John Carney’s mother recruited other mothers and demanded that Washington Square Park in New York be taken back for families and law-abiding citizens. They succeeded, and so did Giuliani on a far grander scale.

Urban decay can be halted, and even reversed, but only by those who are unafraid to hold the average citizen in the highest esteem and who can say without fear: we can have moral standards and we can enforce them.

No, you cannot excrete and bathe in the public fountain.

No, you cannot deal drugs in the park.

No, you cannot infiltrate the border in the dead of night and make a life here.

You have to leave.

Let the Liberal hurl his accusations that such inhibitions on freedom are heartless and cruel. We know better — namely that what Giuliani did for millions of New Yorkers was in fact a great act of compassion, and that the Liberal’s willful blindness to how his infantile fantasies of utopia consign millions to misery and death holds within it the true nature of cruelty.