Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Crime steals the value from life for anyone who is plagued by it. Violations perpetrated upon our minds, bodies, and property impact our sense of wellbeing well beyond the actual act. We are intimately stained by the evil acts of criminals.
The frustration that we feel when some wicked perpetrator gets away with ripping our life apart is overwhelming. The police cannot always save us.
The courts are filled with apologists for the criminal who try to see that minimal punishment is levied. These smug enablers derive personal satisfaction from being merciful to human predators. Most of these self-consciously compassionate soft-on-crime Liberals, Progressives, and Wokesters live very comfortably behind layers of security. It is easy for them to purchase their own sense of self-worth with other people’s preventable suffering.
Society does not seem to cry out in indignation over the sheer outrageousness of the criminal act. A victim of crime can feel very alone.
The very fact of being victimized is itself an outrage. People who live their lives responsibly and who take steps to minimize needless trouble suddenly become an object of violation.
However, even if a person takes every precaution, making every effort not to be singled out by predators, it still might not be enough to deter crime. Crime is a curse which can plague any one of us, regardless of our prudence and despite our precautions.
Crime is not a product of social inequity. Sociologists and psychologists are wrong when they blame society while denying the individual culpability of most criminals. From the childhood bully to the adult rapist and extortionist, criminals have chosen to serve their base drives rather than live within the constraints of civilization. These wicked victimizers are not mere victims of their unfortunate circumstances. They have instead chosen to view other human beings as prey.
In the United States, at least since the era of the Earl Warren Supreme Court, our legal system has added insult to injury with contorted standards of law enforcement and legal interpretations. This Liberal and Progressive jurisprudence harrows the victims of crime with patently ludicrous standards for police conduct and the admissibility of evidence. While these may make sense to some from the safety of a courtroom, they will never make sense in the streets.
In fact, for over six decades the legal system has been weaponized against the law-abiding American citizen in order to provide lawyers with jobs and judges with opportunities to signal their virtue. Career criminals walk free even as the lives of their many victims crumple under the strain of having been successfully violated.
All of this trauma is compounded exponentially in areas of perpetual high crime. I spent part of my childhood in the Bronx of the 1970s. My family lived in a neighborhood that had deteriorated to such a level that no one who didn’t have an urgent reason left their homes after dark.
Everything about life in the Bronx revolved around protecting oneself, one’s home, and one’s loved ones from the ubiquitous criminals who thrived by preying on their fellow human beings. Four-to-six locks on every exterior door, bars over every window, being on constant alert as if we were gazelles on the Serengeti Plain; all of these and more were normal to those of us who inhabited these failed neighborhoods.
The urban blight that rusts out major American cities is not really about crumbling buildings. Blight is found in the wasted lives, the twisted hopes, and the shadow of fear that permeates the consciousnesses of anyone unfortunate enough to live in these areas.
Anyone with a shred of empathy for the slum dwelling victims of perpetual criminality would want to find some way to reimpose the rule of law in these areas. Anyone possessing genuine compassion would serve the victims of crime by imposing maximum punishments. Anyone with any hint of social conscience would want to reclaim crime ridden slums for the American Dream.
This is exactly what President Trump is doing in Washington, DC. He is using his unique authority in our nation’s capital to return control over the streets to law abiding citizens. He is employing the coercive power of the state to restore civilization to areas that had been abandoned to anarchic savagery. Now, the writ of law and not the arbitrary will of gang leaders and drugged-out zombies will govern DC’s neighborhoods.
This should be a model for the restoration of all of America’s cities. There will always be poverty. Crime cannot ever be fully excised from human nature. However, there is absolutely no excuse for any civil government to cede control over the lives of residents.
Yet, the Democrat Party for the longest time has embraced and protected such chaos. Every single crime-ridden slum in the USA has been under Democrat control, at least at the municipal level, for decades. In these areas, Liberal jurists and Democrat-machine politicians have shackled the police’s ability to impose control over criminals.
This coalition of apologists and enablers has continuously pushed their agenda to more radical extremes. Today, cashless bail, minimum value amounts for punishing property crime, open borders, sanctuary cities, and gun control typify their abject appeasement to the professional criminal class.
Without high bail, repeat offenders cannot be kept off of the streets. Without a universal enforcement of property law, occasional shoplifting becomes mass looting. Without control over who is allowed to come and live in the United States, our society’s wealth and liberal laws will attract the worst criminals on Earth. Disarming law abiding citizens makes them the perennial victims of armed criminals.
The Liberal, Progressive, Woke, Democrat willingness to coddle criminals and abide an ongoing high crime rate is callous towards the real victims of crime. Those virtue-signaling jurists who sacrifice the well-being of crime victims in order to build their resume as being virtuously merciful are betraying their public trust.
We who are law-abiding citizens should take back our legal system from such people, empower the police to clean up the streets, and commit to opposing crime rather than compromising with it.
