Given that I'm a denizen of a rural community in Alaska, I'm still an odd one to be writing about the state of America's urban areas. If you've been reading my work for more than about six minutes, you know I grew up in a rural setting in Iowa and am a content rural dweller myself now. I have little time for cities, despite having lived in them for four decades. I find them unpleasant; crowded, noisy, and, to be honest, they smell bad. I like the clean country air of the Susitna Valley, and if that means I have to put up with the occasional moose eating my favorite black ash trees, that's fine.
With that being true, why am I still worried about America's cities? Because our cities are the beating hearts of our nation. Much of the country's economic activity happens there. Urban areas contain a lot of the country's industry and academia. What's more, our cities used to be the pride of the nation, but that's not so much the case anymore. Rampant open-air drug use, huge homeless encampments, and rampant crime, including rioting against federal immigration officers, are taking their toll.
Of these problems, one of the most damaging is the open-air drug markets that are flourishing in some of our cities. These markets are defended, sometimes viciously, and when they are raided and shut down by law enforcement, they simply move - or just brazenly re-open. A New York Post exclusive on one such, in the Bronx, tells a horrible tale of the "drug igloos."
A brazen drug dealer busted for slinging marijuana out of tents on a busy Bronx sidewalk was back on the block just a day after being exposed by The Post.
Though the makeshift shelters were nowhere to be seen Saturday, the thug had no problem laying claim to his turf and vowing their enterprise isn’t going up in smoke.
“Get the f–k outta here!” the man fumed at a Post female reporter who tried gathering information from local residents about the removal of the wintry weed tents along University Avenue in Morris Heights.
“You’re taking my business. You don’t belong here. You’re gonna see what happens. You think this is funny?”
Nobody thinks it's funny. And this isn't just a New York problem. Another Post piece from December informs us of the open-air drug sales and use that are blighting Los Angeles' MacArthur Park.
MacArthur Park has erupted into LA’s fentanyl ground zero — a collapsing, chaos-soaked war zone where overdoses hit by the hour, people die daily, crime crews corner the market — and what used to be a neighborhood park now teeters on the brink of total collapse.
The park, the largest green space in the district, now hosts an unknown number of unhoused people, though on most days it’s fair to estimate the population in the hundreds.
MacArthur’s unofficial “residents” are made comfortable by groups handing out food and even free crack pipes as part of “safe smoking” kits — with tens of millions of dollars coming from the city to support the park’s inhabitants.
That's right - feather-headed nitwits, in the fuzzy name of "compassion", are supporting the addicts, who support the dealers, who make life for the law-abiding residents of the area intolerable.
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These conditions are found in many of our nation's cities: San Diego, Philadelphia, and Seattle, just to name a few.
It's not just the sales. The drugs sold are then used, in the open, in defiance of all expectations of public order. The addicts, often little more than human wreckage, pass out in the parks, on the sidewalks, in the alleyways, and in any building to which they can gain access. It's a self-perpetuating cycle: The markets draw addicts, frequently homeless people; the addicts fuel the markets, drawing more dealers, who draw more addicts, until a region is, like MacArthur Park, unlivable.
Worse is the crime these markets draw. It's more than just the brazen lawlessness of the dealers. The addicts they draw will and do engage in all manner of crime to feed their addictions: Theft, robbery, larceny of all sorts. The enclaves that grow up around these open-air markets are rife with assault, vandalism, and general destruction.
There will be no order in these cities until the dealers are no longer there. There will be no order in these cities until these markets are shut down for good and all. Enforcement should be swift, it should be - must be - vigorous, and penalties must be onerous enough to dissuade the dealers from returning. No more revolving doors. No more wrist-slaps for distribution. And no more fuzzy-headed nitwits supporting the entire crime machine with snacks, crack pipes, and clean needles.
The one legitimate purpose of government, at any level, is to protect the liberty and property of the citizens. In tacitly allowing these open-air drug markets and the crime-ridden enclaves that spring up around them, the municipalities are failing horribly.
