We start with a “blast from the past. My screaming match (several years ago) with former Laconia Daily Sun reporter Mike Kitsch over “financial compassion” while I was on my Hamlet’s budget committee. A reprise about our “chat” in a very public parking lot of the Mills Falls hotel that sets up the rest of the post.
A question for Michael Kitch now that Detroit has gone belly up financially – what’s in your pocket?
I lost all respect, years ago, for Laconia Daily Sun Reporter Michael Kitch when we had a blowout argument that my town was made up of residents and elected officials that were cheapskates. Certainly, he knew that I truly believed that when I was on the Budget Committee in my hamlet, I tried mightily to act in the vein that “this is not my money” – and spent a lot of time trying to convince others of the same. If anything, I tried to be more frugal with other peoples’ money, their property tax monies, than I am with my own. After all, it IS mine – I earned it and I should be able to spend it the way I want to.
Kitch believes otherwise – he could not understand (or stand for) the idea that I (and my town, and other political entities) refused to raise the taxes on our residents simply to send that money to towns and cities that were broke. Broke not because the single industry in town just up and left (and to which I would have some empathy) but because of years and decades of Progressive / Liberal / Democrat rule – the largest example now being Detroit. As I have written here before, we had a screaming match over the fact that I refused to send money to the leaders of those towns, who have already proved that they are incapable of wisely spending their taxpayers monies. WHY would I want to send them more and “enable” their bad habits? His response was that ‘we are all in this together, that there were people still hurting in those cities, that the intent to help was paramount, and it was irrelevant that the political and appointed leaders would just waste that extra money.
Right…I want to give MY hard earned money to people who will just set a match to it via paying off political favors, paying up the huge public unions, kept the hamster treadmill of corruption spinning at supersonic speeds, and to hold blameless these chuckleheads who should be held severely accountable . Instead, in this time of “demanding Justice for Tryvon”, where is the outrage against the Detroit “Leadership” (many who have ending up in jail at a rate similar to that of former Massachusetts Speakers of the House)?
But Kitch believes that I, and folks that believe like me, am the bad guy ’cause I refuse to put my hand in my pocket, pull out the green, and blithely send it away simply because I live in what he believes to be “a rich town”…
Yep, what’s mine and yours is his to have and direct. A Socialist with a byline (and he did use it), berating “rich” towns IN PRINT for not helping poor towns, fomenting and fanning Class Warfare. So when I ran across THIS from Kurt Schlichter about why he doesn’t care about Blue cities, it struck that nerve with me above (plus, why should I care about Baltimore, or their fantabulous math education results (40 schools with few to no students proficient in math).
What we’re seeing in the Democrat cities is a total breakdown of civilization. That’s not an exaggeration. You don’t have a civilization when normal people can’t walk down the street without having to dodge junkies, piles of human waste, and knife-wielding maniacs. You have chaos. But chaos is OK with the inhabitants of the Democrat big cities. I know that because they keep electing people who allow their cities to be chaotic. I’m supposed to be outraged and upset by this, but my caring bandwidth is limited. I can only care about so much, and what I cannot do is care more about the plight that the blue voters have placed themselves in than the blue voters who elected the Democrats who allow this to happen do.
Blue cities, this is your problem, not mine. I don’t live in one. I live near one, but not inside it…Understand me. I don’t think that people in blue cities should not have safe and clean streets. I think they should. But they don’t think they should. And I know they don’t think they should because they refuse to elect people who will ensure they do. Don’t tell me that these problems are intractable and unsolvable because we watched Rudy Giuliani take New York City back from the Taxi Driver abyss when it was equally scummy and turn it into an urban paradise.
Decline is a choice and is often chosen with votes.
Many voters in Democrat cities have chosen such EVEN AS their candidates have rather poor records in living up to what their campaign promises say their results will be. And I dare say, for the rest of us that DON’T live in such cities, we don’t have their kind of problems. I chose my hamlet over 40 years ago, KNOWING that problems similar to what I saw in Boston existed up here – but they were rare, and the intensity was way down the scale. Sure, during that time, crime rates have gone up, but I blame that on a changing culture.
In fact, that’s the root cause of America’s problems as well, ESPECIALLY in the Democrat strongholds. But the culture has FAR MORE descended into the depth of hell (as Schlichter puts it) there than it has in the Heartlands and in the rural areas. The idea that people should be moral, have a sense of being part of something bigger than themselves, and that they are held accountable by others (and NOT an insignificant belief that also means to God). They hold on to traditional American mores and norms – and traditions despite the best efforts of the Left too, as Van Jones said, “bottom-up, inside out” alongside Obama’s infamous phrase that it was time to “fundamentally transform America.”
So, Democrats went ahead and started it. They continue to do so today. We should be surprised. They TOLD us, in clear language, that was their goal. Kitsch is evidence for it. The dumbing down of America is the delivery mechanism.
And they want me to be “compassionate”? No – Schlichter used the word “shrugging.” If it is one, two, maybe up to 5 elections, and THEN start turning things around using their votes? Perhaps. But this is a decades, if not century-long phenomenon. They CHOSE this – deliberately. Those that could have already fled, but until those who remain take charge of their government CHANGE that government and the results it gives, I have nothing but “compassion fatigue.” In fact, with a lot of the Progressive policies being failures, when you compare their rhetoric to the results, I shrug at those who vote for them.
Not my problem.
Thanks, Obama, for turning the major components of your constituency into drooling idiots to the point that they are so poorly educated that crime, drugs, and hedonism are all that is left for them to do or be.
Be less…by design.
