A friend from a relatively peaceful, rural part of the country recently posted a sad photo to her social media. It was a picture of a homeless man, dirty, toothless, and clearly confused, laying in a sleeping bag right next to the outdoor patio of a San Francisco restaurant. The people on the patio were eating their lunch, seemingly oblivious to the horror show right next to them. The homeless man was staring off into the distance, likewise oblivious to the patrons mere feet away on the other side of the patio rails.

My friend was disgusted. Not with the man, but with the people who clearly had chosen to continue their meal despite the degradation in their eye lines.

“This is f***ing pathetic!” she shouted, virtually. “I don’t care what is happening here. What kind of a monster just casually eats lunch while someone is homeless and starving to death right next to them?”

She ended her tirade with a favorite flourish of social media rants. “If you plan on making excuses for these people, unfriend me now!”

I did chime in, but my reasoning was not welcome. I did not obey her command to unfriend her, but I eventually decided to let her wallow in her own ignorance.

I tried to tell her that it’s very easy for someone like her to make a sweeping judgement about a photo that captures one split second in time. I told her that she doesn’t understand the situation in San Francisco right now, or in most major cities for that matter. I told her that I knew what she didn’t know – that is, that man probably had been offered food. Many times. He had probably been offered shelter. The police had probably been called often. I knew there was a high probability that man was insane, high, or both. I knew San Francisco is overwhelmed with clinically insane homeless people who are unmedicated and often descend into violent rages when approached by anyone.

The people eating next to him may have looked uncaring, but San Franciscans have been extremely generous when it comes to giving their tax dollars to solve the homeless crisis. The truth is, those people probably knew better than to approach that man. The truth is, those people were probably just numb to it all by that point. The city refuses to actually solve the problem with the billions of tax dollars that are dedicated to the solutions every year. The police are limited by policies that don’t allow them to enforce vagrancy or petty crime laws. The businesses are prevented from solving their own problems by using scenic obstructions such as planters or artwork to prevent the homeless from camping and pooping within feet of their establishments. Almost no one is allowed to do anything, and the only people allowed to do anything choose to do nothing.

So everyone lives with it.

That is the only choice you have in an American city center these days. Live with it. Democrats have almost exclusive control of every major American city, and their policies have led to a nationwide homelessness and crime crisis that should seem inconceivable given our republican form of government. Every city should look different according to how each area decides how to govern themselves, and yet every Democrat city looks exactly the same…miserable.

And yes, city life is a bit heartless these days, but I don’t believe that is because most Americans are heartless. I believe Democrat policies force people to be heartless.

Here in California, we have a thing called “road diets.” It is a purposeful restriction of traffic flow in order to make driving individual vehicles so painful it will force drivers into public transportation. It is aided by timing traffic lights so vehicles must stop every block and limiting parking. In the most populous cities in America, it creates the traffic hell the rest of America is used to associating with places like L.A. and San Francisco. Again, all on purpose.

When a friend and coworker came to a work event here in the Los Angeles area once, he was headed back to the airport to catch his flight home, and asked if I might be willing to drop him at LAX instead of him having to wait for an Uber. After all, the exit is right on my way home. Could I take a few extra minutes to drop him at the terminal?

My answer was thoughtless and immediate. No. It was the same answer everyone else around me had when he turned to them (in my defense, work was paying for the Uber, so I wasn’t forcing him to take on any extra cost).

Still, I declined. Pre-California Kira would have said yes in a heartbeat. My friend wouldn’t have even had to ask pre-California Kira. That Kira was generous. That Kira was compassionate.

California Kira is tired and world-weary.

That’s because here, thanks to those “road diets” and other traffic socialism, there is no such thing as taking a “quick” detour to the airport on the way home. If I “pop over to LAX,” the drive that is already going to cost me two hours to travel 45 miles now gets another 45 minutes added to it. Just the one mile of stoplights that are programmed to turn red at every intersection between the exit and the airport entrance is brutal. Then there is the grossly mismanaged traffic flow around LAX. There is no direct public transportation from any spot into LAX so there’s nowhere to drop someone to take a train the rest of the way. LAX doesn’t even have an inter-airport transportation system. If you end up at the wrong terminal you’re walking to the next one.

It’s an ugly, brutal, time-consuming experience. A few miles turns into an hour’s journey. No one just drops friends at the airport in L.A. The city isn’t built for kindness.

And that’s the problem. Democrat/socialist policies inevitably lead to selfishness and unkindness. The average resident can’t afford those little acts of kindness anymore. Attending to that man on the street comes with risks. People are injured and murdered every week in this state by insane homeless people. Recently, a homeless man wandered into a hardware store and brutally stabbed a young female employee. Why? Because he was crazy and no other reason.

Stopping to feed that homeless man in the picture I described could have all kinds of consequences for someone who is just walking with their children, or a young woman on her way home from school, or an elderly person. I’ve often been moved to attend to some desperate-looking person laying in the street, but I have children waiting for me at home and my family depends on me. I have to calculate whether or not I’m willing to risk getting home to them to help someone who could kill me, someone who is on the street because of horrendous Democrat state and city policy.

I have to decide whether or not my family should be made to wait for me another hour while I take that “quick detour” to the airport, or whether or not I have the stamina to fight traffic for a third hour after working all day.

My neighbors have to decide whether or not they let that drug addict sleep in the park on our corner out of compassion, or whether they choose the safety of their own children walking to and from school over the comfort of that clearly suffering human being.

But that man is there not because the people here refuse to help him, but because our government refuses to help any of us.

Democrat policies kill compassion. There are those of us who are beholden to a higher power, and take on charitable ministry as a function of that devotion, but that still requires a concerted effort in cities built to thwart that effort at every turn. In Democrat hell, small acts of kindness are very hard to offer, and equally hard to come by.

That’s probably on purpose. The less we can depend on each other, the more we have to depend on government.