Don’t expect the Left or its mascot groups to solve their own problems. They’ve been told – relentlessly, for decades – that their problems aren’t really theirs to solve. No, that responsibility belongs elsewhere…probably to “the government.”
What’s that you say? If they created the problem – perhaps by letting the garbage pile up until their neighborhoods are unlivable from the filth and the rats – why shouldn’t they be expected to solve it? You’re asking the wrong guy, Gentle Reader. I’m with you! Still, they who dwell in such places simply won’t stir their stumps for their own sake, nor for the sake of their children.
Whatever the problem, it’s always someone else’s fault, and someone else’s responsibility. That’s the code of the Left.
Now and then, some well-meaning sort – usually a conservative, politically – picks up the Left’s slack:
MAGA fan Scott Presler was tired of all the constant bickering in the media about Baltimore’s numerous problems, so he personally decided to do something about it. Rather than simply complain or join the online chorus, he has organized a massive trash clean up of the city set to take place in the near future. Presler just wants to help out in any way that he can.
“I’m so tired of people saying, ‘We should do this, we should do that’….I was just like, ‘I’ve had, it. I’m going to go to Baltimore, even if it’s just me on a street corner picking up trash,'” he told The Epoch Times.
On Saturday, July 28, the activist told his online following that anybody who wanted to come to help clean up Baltimore was welcome. He encouraged Trump supporters to wear Trump gear but told The Epoch Times that anybody can participate when the event takes place.
“I just want the citizens of Baltimore to see [that] we do care. We do give a darn. And at the end of the day, we’re all American and if ya’ll are struggling in Baltimore and you guys need help, then we’re going to be there for you,” he said.
Presler isn’t all talk and no action; he followed through. Over 170 volunteers descended on one of the worst districts in West Baltimore, attacked the trash and filth with energy, and cleaned it out. And what followed that effort? Why, this, of course!
Look, we appreciate anyone who is willing to roll up their sleeves to help Baltimore. More than 170 people came from all over the country and cleaned up nearly 12 tons of trash, according to Mr. Presler’s Twitter feed. He doesn’t post any photos of the totality of the trash, so we’ll have to take his word for it….
Whatever he says his motives were, Mr. Presler’s presence in Baltimore reinforces the tired image of our failing urban cores. That the poor people in this dilapidated city can’t take care of their own neighborhoods and all the public officials around them have failed as well. The bureaucratic, all-talk Democrats strike again. If a crowd of volunteers could clean up 12 tons of trash in 12 hours, how incompetent and helpless must Baltimoreans be if they can’t manage it in decades, right?…
The silver lining in all of this is that the residents of West Baltimore did get a much needed cleaning up. That is something that they deserve. Streets and alleyways free of trash go a long way in improving the psyche of a neighborhood and its residents. Not to mention deterring crime. Mr. Presler says that people around the country are planning similar clean up events in their own communities. A loud round of applause for that as well. Spiffier neighborhoods are good for everyone.
We also hope Mr. Presler keeps his promise to return to Baltimore once a month. It would definitely give his motives more credibility. It might also give him better perspective about the city’s problems than any single visit can provide. Maybe it could even lead him and his followers to advocate for federal housing, health care, transportation, education, criminal justice, civil rights and anti-poverty policies aimed at urban communities.
In the meantime, we’ll see how clean the neighborhood still is when he returns in September.
Allow me to say this, right out front: The editors of the Baltimore Sun are villainous scum. They deserve to be stripped naked and flogged through the streets of their own city. Here’s the giveaway, right from their own despicable editorial:
…the residents of West Baltimore did get a much needed cleaning up. That is something that they deserve.
They deserved it? By what right? By what standard? And from whom? Why weren’t those alleys clean in the first place? Who put them into the condition Presler’s volunteers found and remediated? Are these “editors,” who deserve to spend a month sleeping in such an alley, suggesting that all that trash and filth was brought there from afar? Are they suggesting that the precious “residents of West Baltimore” had no part in its creation – or that they had no responsibility to see to its removal?
We both know better, don’t we, Gentle Reader?
Kim Du Toit once wrote a visionary article about another benighted place: Let Africa Sink. He understood that savages cannot be civilized by external means – that they must rise into civilization by their own efforts. First World involvement with Africa, however well-meaning, has only deepened its problems by providing its savages with more and better tools of savagery.
So also with our domestic savages.
Know the savages by their works, Gentle Reader. Know them by what they produce…and by what they tolerate. Know them by the degeneration of their neighborhoods into crime-ridden, rat-infested middens. Know them by the conduct of their progeny. Know them by their complete spinelessness in the midst of such violence and squalor. Know them by the way they disavow all responsibility for those things. It’s always someone else’s responsibility to put it right.
But when someone else lends a hand, they denigrate it. They cast aspersions on the charitable one and question his motives. It makes them look bad, you see. It suggests that remediation was always possible – that they could have helped themselves, for the volunteers are persons much like themselves who merely took it upon themselves to act. It implies that they’re the irresponsible savages they appear to be – and they can’t have that.
The solution to Baltimore, and to comparable zones of savagery in other parts of the nation, is to wash our hands of them. Wall them off! No one should be allowed in or out, lest the savagery prove infectious and propagate to other regions. The residents are willing to tolerate crime and filth, so let them keep it to themselves. An occasional overflight – not too low, Chopper Dan; the natives throw stuff – would be useful for producing instructional videos to show our young’uns about the standards and behavior of savages.
Quoth Du Toit:
It sounds dreadful to say it, but if the entire African continent dissolves into a seething maelstrom of disease, famine and brutality, that’s just too damn bad. We have better things to do — sometimes, you just have to say, “Can’t do anything about it.”
Replace “African continent” with “city of Baltimore.” Repeat as necessary for other savage districts, here and elsewhere. Chill and serve cold.
Yes, I am perfectly serious.