|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
On Saturday, September 2, 2023, I woke from sleep at four a.m. and looked out my window in search of the waning moon. Media had described the second full moon of August as a “blue moon” and a “super moon” and I hadn’t yet seen it.
I saw some black men partying on the sidewalk around Costello Park. Lately the park has become a site of all-night parties. Men gather on the sidewalk after sunset and remain till near dawn. I’d estimate about fifteen partiers. They sit on milk crates and metal chairs that Paterson, as part of a renovation, using taxpayer dollars from wealthier towns, placed in Costello Park. The metal chairs have been dragged out of the park onto the sidewalk for the all-night parties. Eventually these chairs, one by one, are disappearing entirely.
Car stereos blast rap music. There are kids in this building, black kids, Hispanic kids, poor kids. I grew up poorer than these kids, but I never had to struggle for sleep against intrusive noise pollution. I never had to sleep through classes in school because there was so much noise in the street the night before. Loud street parties were just not done. In my hometown, fathers left for work before we left for school. They worked hard all day. They arrived home in worn blue uniforms stained with dirt and grease. They ate dinner, they watched TV for a short while, and then they snored in comfortable chairs till wives or kids gently roused them and ushered them to bed. These hard-working men needed sleep, and the town was quiet at night.
I mentioned the noise in a Facebook post. I met Merlin when I was a grad student at UC Berkeley. Merlin is handsome, witty, and charismatic. He’s a PhD, polyamorist, international bon vivant, and Burning Man veteran. He lived on Grizzly Peak, 1,400 feet up in the Berkeley Hills, where even small homes cost over a million dollars. As night follows day, Merlin said that my mentioning Paterson’s noise was racist. Only a white supremacist would gripe about loud and obscene rap from car stereos all night long.
“Noise pollution loudest in black neighborhoods” announced a 2017 headline. “This is yet another study that shows that communities of color bear a disproportionate burden of pollution … [noise pollution] makes things worse for everybody,” UC Berkeley researchers reported. What does it do to children’s little bodies to emerge into a world of car stereos, police sirens, screams, crashes? Noise pollution damages children’s minds and bodies in all the ways described here. And the all-night partiers don’t just pollute with noise. They leave trash like paper plates and plastic bottles scattered on the sidewalk around the park.
I didn’t see the moon on September 2. I had been at the window for less than a minute. I returned to bed. I heard a crash. My nerves burst into flames; my muscles stiffened; my breath became rapid and shallow; my stomach clenched and poured out acid. I have become very familiar with this bodily response to stressful stimuli. I’m an adult and can try to quell this response with practiced prayer and meditation. I know that Paterson’s majority minority children are too young to master these skills and, as a teacher, I know that they suffer in ways that I don’t.
I investigated the apartment. I couldn’t find the source of the crashing sound. I went back to bed and tried to sleep. I had to get up early the next morning to work. Sleep eluded me. Again, at work, all day, I’d be fighting to stay alert, to rein in my dyslexia and spell words correctly.
In the morning light I saw the broken glass and the shattered pane. Someone had thrown a rock at my window, just after I had looked out that window in search of the moon.
I phoned the police. “I’ll make a report,” an officer said. There was no visit. The blasé response was nothing new. A few years back, very close to this spot, it was my head, not the window, that was hit with a large rock. On that occasion, I had unwittingly stumbled between two gangs fighting. I regained consciousness, pushed myself off the sidewalk, and stumbled home through scattering black youths, eager to remove themselves as rapidly as possible from the scene of a downed white woman. I phoned the police. A police officer arrived hours later, spent five minutes in my apartment, and told me with a sneer that I should not be living here. So much for the leftist fantasy that white women assaulted by black men exercise magical power over police.
I wrote to Passaic County Sheriff Richard H. Berdnik about the rock and the window. Debra Wahba, his representative, wrote back “Sheriff Berdnik wanted you to know he has directed our Patrol Officers to give this area extra attention.” There are good reasons, beyond my broken window, to “give this area extra attention.” The block bordering Costello Park is about a tenth of a mile long. In recent years, in this small area, there has been a fatal stabbing, a storeowner shot to death in his shop, a fatal shooting, and an elderly woman raped on the sidewalk. I have, though, seen no enhanced police presence around Costello Park, and the all-night parties continue and have, in recent days, grown louder.
The Lou Costello Memorial Park has been featured in The Sopranos and the 2016 Adam Driver film Paterson. It was created in 1992. The New Jersey Community Development Corporation renovated the park in 2022. The NJCDC spins a sanitized narrative of the park on its webpage. The park, this narrative runs, “fell into disrepair … it became a park that not many people felt comfortable visiting.” The NJCDC saved the park, it wants people to know, by razing a gazebo. Gazebos apparently ruin parks. The NJCDC then took taxpayer money from wealthier towns and erected a playground designed for autistic children. The NJCDC and Paterson’s mayor slapped themselves on the back. They had “improved” this corner of Paterson.
The NJCDC’s narrative is a fantasy. The park did not “fall into disrepair.” The gazebo wasn’t doing anything bad to anyone. It was an attractive, antique structure. Addicts and vagrants slept in the gazebo. Police could have removed them. Crippled by leftist ideology, they did not. So the attractive structure needed to be removed. Wealthier, better-run towns, with conservative local governments, do have gazebos. Rockaway, New Jersey’s gazebo hosts a summer concert series.
A few years back, I was trying to prepare a lesson. My concentration was interrupted by the sound of a man screaming and blows being struck. Without even realizing what I was doing, I didn’t consciously register the sounds and I pushed myself to focus on my lesson plan. Then I stopped myself. “What the hell has happened to me, that I try to ignore the sound of someone screaming and the sound of fists hitting a human body?”
I left my lesson planning. I discovered a disheveled black man in Costello Park. He was screaming and punching himself. I began the interior dialogue I have conducted many times. “Do I call the police? Are police the best solution? Am I invading this man’s space? Maybe he doesn’t want police. What he’s doing looks pretty self-destructive to me, but maybe this is how he wants to spend an otherwise quiet Sunday morning. Don’t the police have more important matters to attend to? Maybe this behavior will stop momentarily.”
I asked myself these same questions many times: when I saw a teenage boy beat a teenage girl and tear off her shirt and bra, in the middle of the street, leaving her naked to the waist. Both seemed equally aggressive. Did either really want police? When I saw a barefoot woman wobbling in the middle of an active commuter road at rush hour. The many times I passed a man standing, staring into space, and I asked, “Are you okay? Do you want me to call someone? Do you need help?” and the man couldn’t answer. All of the people in the above encounters have been black. Would a white police officer make these vulnerable people tense and would things spiral downward?
One of my students, a leftist, once went on a rant about the vagrants in Costello Park. “Doesn’t anyone see them? Doesn’t anyone care? Our society is so callous!” Surrounding listeners applauded her for her “compassion.”
I had no patience for her tired charade. “Open your eyes,” I said, no doubt sounding harsh. “Don’t you see the Salvation Army across the street from Costello Park? Don’t you see Eva’s Village, founded by a Catholic priest? Don’t you see the visitors from the mostly white, suburban evangelical church who visit the park regularly, offering food and aid, the government aid agencies dispensing taxpayer funded food, housing, health care? It’s not, quote, society, unquote, that doesn’t care about these men. It’s these men who don’t care about themselves or about you or me. If they cared about themselves or about us would they refuse the aid offered them? Would they be leaving discarded needles and emptied liquor bottles on the very sidewalks kids walk to get to Paterson school number two?”
The emptied liquor bottles from the all-night parties really get me. Multiple trash cans are conveniently placed in and around the park. An empty Courvoisier bottle can’t weigh that much. The partiers can carry a full Courvoisier bottle to a public park, but they can’t carry an empty bottle twenty feet to a trash can. And, no, they don’t just toss the bottles. They place them, upright and empty, on the sidewalk, sidewalks that they know will service dozens of pedestrians. It’s like they want normal people to know, “While you and your kids slept soundly, trying to follow the rules that create a normal, healthy, happy life, I was a hundred feet away, making sure that no matter how much you try to make this neighborhood better, you’ll always live in a slum.” I want to say to these men, “You are so poor, you have to stop drivers in traffic alongside Costello Park to beg for change, you have to urinate and defecate a hundred feet from autistic kids in their special new playground, but you can afford Courvoisier?”
The New Jersey Community Development Corporation lies continue. Costello Park “became a park that not many people felt comfortable visiting.” In fact, before the expensive renovation, there were always “many people” in Costello Park. A cute, petite housewife and mother who takes great joy in decorating her apartment and the surrounding hallway for every holiday was in that park every morning. She had a little fluffball of a dog. Every time I saw that pooch I’d bend down to pet her and she’d flood my face with kisses. On hot summer nights, folks who can’t afford air conditioning would sit around waiting for the temperature to dip one degree. Don Kommit, our Beat-Era-veteran poet, walked past the park to the bodega for his canned soup. Urban kids’ only experience of leaves changing color in fall took place in that park. Thank you to whomever planted the park’s Washington hawthorns.
If the NJCDC really wanted to improve the park, the solution would be right-wing – changing the behavior of antisocial people. But the NJCDC, it goes without saying, did not take that controversial route of addressing antisocial behavior. Rather, it opted for the left-wing solution – an infusion of taxpayer dollars. Taxpayer dollars generated by hardworking people who don’t party all night and who live in wealthier towns; see here.
As part of its renovation, the NJCDC installed a Little Free Library. A Little Free Library is a wooden box placed on a wooden post. There is a glass window. Inside are books, free to anyone who wants them. A Little Free Library can cost about four hundred dollars. Little Free Libraries pride themselves on distributing “books that provide perspectives on racism and social justice; celebrate BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized voices; and incorporate experiences from all identities for all readers.” The Little Free Library in Costello Park was immediately attacked as if it were an invading enemy. Someone smashed the glass, ripped up the free books, and tossed the pages all around the park. Someone smashed the wooden structure to bits, reducing it to nothing but a stump in the ground. See here.
Some naïve soul installed a second Little Free Library in Costello Park. The new Little Free Library was artistically painted. Whoever painted it wanted to make clear that the Little Free Library was meant to help children access free, attractive reading material, like picture books. Dr. Seuss and other beloved children’s book characters were painted on the Little Free Library exterior.
The destroyer wrecked the new, improved Little Free Library almost immediately after it was installed. Again, the glass was smashed, the wood was pried apart, and the books were ripped up and the scattered pages remained in the park for days, no one bothering to discard them in a convenient garbage can. The expensive, newly installed playground for autistic children was littered with pages from Little Free Library books. Taxpayer dollars sucked into Paterson from wealthier towns “renovated” the park, and within days it looked like a garbage dump.
Someone could have installed a cheap surveillance camera in the park, and discovered who was destroying the Little Free Library. That would not be done, of course, for the same reason the vagrants and addicts sleeping in the park would never be removed by police. Antisocial behavior cannot be punished. It can’t even be mentioned. If you mention antisocial behavior, you are a white supremacist, as Merlin will remind you.
The fate of the Little Free Libraries speaks loudly. You can pour all the money you want into dangerous and decaying cities like Paterson. That money, that comes from taxpayers who do follow civilizational guidelines, is stolen and squandered. Until you change the culture of the antisocial residents in cities like Paterson, no amount of money will improve the lives lived in Paterson.
In the nineteen sixties, America, following leftist ideology, decided that there are no standards, and no behavior can be judged as right or wrong. Identities, rather than behavior, were to be judged. Whites bad blacks good. America decided that illegal drug use is glamorous and funny, and those who condemn drug use are reactionary fascists. Now you cannot speak of “addicts;” you must use the Woke term “person with substance abuse disorder,” thus erasing any personal choice or responsibility. America decided that schools should not discipline any kids and especially not black males. Only racists discipline black male students. America decided that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, “love makes a family,” “Tango makes three,” and Heather will not suffer for not having a dad. America decided that “all cops are bastards,” and that Michael Brown was a “gentle giant” who said “Hands up don’t shoot.” A rich white woman living in a comfortable suburb can believe all these delusional, toxic, leftist lies and not suffer. This leftist ideology kills people where I live, and where millions of other Americans live. Leftist ideology doesn’t just kill individuals. Leftist ideology kills entire cities.
The other day I was talking to a Paterson old timer. His parents were impoverished immigrants. They had been mistreated and malnourished. They were not savvy. They came to Paterson, America’s first planned industrial city, a textile hub and manufacturing center, in the hopes of economic advancement. When they first arrived, their neighborhood was like them. It was poor, but it was safe, and clean, and people looked out for each other.
And then, this old timer told me the other day, everything changed. “It wasn’t slow. It was fast. It was like watching a time lapse film of a rose decaying.”
“Tell me,” I said, “what happened.”
“Well, white people got beat up in the streets. You were a white kid walking home from school and they’d just jump you and beat you up. They’d spray paint their neighbors houses. Break windows. Suddenly the streets were full of garbage. Cars stolen or just vandalized. Tires slashed. We knew we had to move. When I look at Paterson today,” his voice was full of emotion, “it breaks my heart. It was poor, but it was nice. If you had garbage on the street in front of your store, the cop would ticket you.”
I’ve heard similar stories many times. The power narrative is that “white flight” was all about white supremacy. After whites left, neighborhoods went downhill slowly but surely, only because of white neglect: no investment, no services, no repairmen. This old timer, and others like him, tell a different story. They didn’t leave because they didn’t like black newcomers. Many were immigrants and had minimal previous contact with black people. They had not inherited a culture of white supremacy. Rather, black newcomers hated white neighbors as their archetypal enemy, the white man, and targeted them for violent crime. Neighborhoods didn’t go downhill after years of neglect. They went downhill rapidly. The neighborhood’s decline was a reflection of culture. A gazebo didn’t suddenly render a park unsafe. Human behavior, fashioned by culture, rendered a park unsafe.
Leftists demonize anyone who says these things, and professional and personal punishment follow. White supremacists read accounts like this and insist that their sick, evil ideology is correct. And most people, who are neither leftists nor white supremacists, don’t care. Paterson’s bullets don’t penetrate their walls. They don’t have to enter into a conversation in which no matter what you say, you risk personal damage.
The leftists and the white supremacists are both wrong. Antisocial behavior is not an expression of genes. It’s an expression of culture. Yes, the individual black people who choose to deal drugs or steal cars are doing something wrong. Everyone, including white people, does bad things. I’ve certainly done bad things. When I did bad things as a child, nuns beat the stuffing out of me, mercilessly, even, sometimes, when I didn’t do anything bad. My parents supported the nuns. I got the message: you do a bad thing, and everyone will descend upon you with punishment, including God himself. There were no excuses for me. My behavior changed.
An individual black kid committing an act of vandalism, like throwing a rock through my window, meets with a different societal response, one that shapes his behavior just as my behavior was shaped when I did bad things. There are larger forces at work, and those larger forces are largely made up of powerful white leftists who insist it is racist to require black people to live up to the same standards as white people.
Behind the young men making sleep impossible with their loud car stereos blaring violent, sadistic, and misogynist lyrics, beyond the man screaming and beating himself in the park, above the wannabe gangstas shooting black kids dead in the street, I see armies of white leftists pushing each behavior.
I see LBJ, wanting to monopolize the “n-word” vote “for two hundred years,” enacting policies that damaged black families, but did ensure that blacks would vote for Democrats. I see smug Stephen Colbert, on his popular late night show, winking and nudging about how cool drug use is. I see teachers’ unions turning American public education into an oxymoron. I see Upper West Side voters choosing candidates who undermine police and refuse to prosecute violent criminals. I see Hollywood and music company executives who want black people to act out their own antisocial fantasies that they would never act out themselves. These entertainment executives profit from peddling images of black men as gangstas and black women as hos. I see the Smithsonian Institution using taxpayer dollars to demonize the very qualities that would rescue my neighbors from wretched lives. Being on time, being polite, believing in God, practicing the scientific method, working hard, are all “white” see the Smithsonian chart here. I see Pagans using my law-abiding, but poor neighbors as human sacrifices for their twisted religious rituals.
I see social media contacts, Merlin, Judy, Jean, Susan, Amanda, Ellen, none of whom live in black neighborhoods, none of whom read black conservatives, attacking anyone who voices any of these truths. When I invited Merlin to watch a video by black conservative Larry Elder, Merlin refused to do so, insisting that he would never expose himself to any ideas promoted by Dennis Prager.
Watch a statistics-dense Prager University presentation by Larry Elder, here. Read an excerpt from the superb book False Black Power by black conservative Jason L. Riley, here. These two black conservatives and other black conservatives like them agree: policies initiated and supported by leftist whites hurt black people.
I don’t just see rich white leftists building an ideological fence around antisocial behavior and rendering it immune to corrective consequences. I also see very good people, productive people who are white and black and brown and trapped in hell because they are poor and leftists have decided that poor, majority minority communities, unlike rich, white communities, will not have any standards or police or law.
Yes, I see black men partying on the street day and night. I also see black women in nurse’s aide uniforms leaving for work before dawn. I see black women dressed up for church on Sunday morning. I see black women driving Paterson’s buses. I saw my own black, female students working hard to do well in college classrooms. Black women aren’t just more likely to be in college; in one study, black females actually responded to perceived racism by improving their eating and exercise habits, while black males did not. I don’t know if anyone has the definitive answer to why there is a shift of “wealth and power” from black males to black females, but we need to look at this and apply whatever women are doing right to men.
One of my neighbors is an Hispanic immigrant. He has a landscaping business. He also has a workshop in a garage where he tinkers after hours. He also has cultivated “waste” ground along Route 80. One day he stopped me and made me take zucchini, celery, and a large bag of tomatoes. He doesn’t even know my name; he just sees me walking past his garden and wanted to do something kind.
Another one of my neighbors is a black woman. She’s a jazz singer. She’s been well-reviewed in the New York Times and the New York Post. She has been invited to sing internationally. She does volunteer work to improve her community. One day she saw me walking and offered me a ride in her very old but serviceable car.
A few of my neighbors are adjunct professors. They teach future generations. Adjuncts make less than minimum wage for the hours that they work. They live in low-rent neighborhoods.
If parents, teachers, and police enforced civilizational guidelines in Paterson, my neighbors who, yes, are poor, but, again, who work hard and play by the rules, would have better lives. The refusal, by those in power, to address antisocial behavior from a minority of the population, or the refusal by those in power who insist on misrepresenting antisocial behavior as something glamorous or revolutionary, betray the Hispanic immigrant who works like a dog, the talented black jazz singer who is well-reviewed and has appeared on Broadway but who can’t earn enough from her art to live in Rockaway, the adjunct professors who work in Wayne but live in Paterson, the housewife with the fluffy dog who loves to decorate, and the innocent kids who couldn’t help being born here and who are just starting out in life.
Sunday, October 1, I really needed to get away. The rock through the window was just one of a series of mini disasters. I’d recently gotten bad news about my health, and stress has been eating me up. I walked to Garret Mountain and saw a fire in the woods. I phoned Paterson police. An operator said that Paterson police would not respond. I needed to be transferred to state police. She put me on hold and eventually hung up on me. I phoned state police. An operator told me that state police would not respond; Paterson police would. She said she’d transfer me. I gave up. I told myself that I can’t fix Paterson police. I told myself that maybe someone else would see and report the fire.
I got home and tried to relax. I began watching a Bollywood romantic comedy; perfect escape fare. And then I heard an all too familiar sound: pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. It’s like fireworks, except there is no shower sound at the end. Someone was just shot, I realized.
“You can’t fix it,” I told myself. “Just ignore it.” And I did. I’m still thinking about that. That I just wanted to ignore someone getting shot to death less than a hundred feet from me.
My ability to ignore the drive-by shooting that took place outside my window was limited. I eventually gave up on retreating into the Bollywood rom-com and joined my neighbors in the street. We saw what you see after a shooting. Yellow tape, many police officers, one of whom was placing white markers near where bullets were found. Mary Taylor was a 22-year-old woman. Accounts say that she was an “innocent bystander.” This strikes me as an odd way to put it. Gunning people down in the street does not strike me as an appropriate way to end any human life. Of course she was an innocent bystander. The gunman, according to reports, was wearing a ski mask and driving a stolen car. As of this writing, he is still at large.
It would be another night when it would be difficult to sleep.
In 2022, after honor student and Paterson resident Robert Cuadra was shot to death while helping his grandmother carry groceries into her home, I wished I could write an essay about Robert that would make people care about him. That would make his name as famous as that of George Floyd. That would rouse America into addressing the factors that contributed to his death.
I now wish I could say anything worthy about Mary Taylor, whose death I heard as I was trying to escape into a romantic comedy. She was my neighbor. No doubt we crossed paths many times, but I didn’t know her. All I can tell you is her name, her age, how it sounded when she was shot to death, and what the pavement looked like after her body was carried away.
I wish black celebrities with powerhouse resources, I’m thinking Beyonce, Christian Cooper, Denzel Washington, Lebron James, and Barack Obama, read about the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, and other research like it. I wish they would mount a project that would have an equal and opposite impact as LBJ had on the black family. Children who grow up with a biological father in the home are less likely to end up in jail. Period. End of sentence. You’ve got that information; now apply it in the real world. The late, great black conservative, Walter E. Williams, stressed the inescapable issue of the black family again and again. See here, here, and here.
Second wish: broken windows policing. Read more about broken windows policing here. Given previous criminal activity, major and minor, Mayor Andre Sayegh and police had every reason to know that this one-tenth-mile stretch of Paterson, NJ, would soon be the site of another drive-by shooting. If they had practiced broken windows policing, one 22 year old woman might still be alive.
Mayor Sayegh’s approach is different. “I am bringing taxpayer money into Paterson,” Mayor Sayegh boasts. “So what?” many Patersonians ask. “So what if you siphon money from richer towns into this poor city? The streets are still full of garbage. Crime is still rampant. Schools are still failing students.” “Paterson NJ Public Schools Are Falling Apart Despite $500 Million from State,” and “Paterson NJ High School Graduation Scores Fall Short,” are a couple of recent headlines. “Almost 90% of the city’s students failed math … while more than 60% flunked language arts,” Reported the Bergen Record in August, 2023. Because Paterson students do so poorly, a leftist solution was attempted: standards were lowered to make it easier for Paterson students to graduate. In spite of this leftist lowering of standards, “the academic performance gap between Paterson students and their counterparts from the rest of New Jersey grew larger in the past year.”
On his Facebook page, Mayor Sayegh, who seems to be a very nice guy and dedicated to his job, boasted of yet another project bringing money into Paterson. Romeo Habibi, who self-identifies as a dishwasher, commented, “You can change the city look but you can’t change the people mentality what’s the point of building and we can’t walk safe with our kids or smelling drugs” [sic].
Mary Taylor was murdered a third of a mile from the Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park. As North Jersey dot com put it, “Mayor Andre Sayegh hopes to make” the Paterson Falls Park “the centerpiece of Paterson’s revival.” The money poured into the Falls Park is like the money poured into Costello Park. Until someone in power addresses the culture, there will be no “revival” of Paterson. The press reports that the murder of Mary Taylor “was across the street from Costello Park, where the mayor held about a half dozen press conference in recent years to highlight a $1 million recreation renovation project,” and also near other investment sites that the mayor boosted. “David Soo, head of the tenants association of an apartment building across the street from where the woman was shot … took issue with the mayor’s social media videos highlighting what Sayegh calls his accomplishments in Paterson. Soo said the mayor’s videos send ‘a clear message that playing make-believe is more important than the people of Paterson.'”
Criminals, even in Paterson, are the minority. The rest of us are poor, but we are normal. We are a housewife and mother who loves to decorate for the holidays. We are poets and adjunct professors. We are honor students looking forward to benefitting from a scholarship. We are 22-year-old women just starting out in life. We obey the law; we don’t take drugs; we yearn for normalcy. A normalcy we could only experience in a world where kids are brought up by both biological parents, where the state does not undermine the family, where teachers are allowed to set and enforce standards, where cops are, as they always will be, imperfect, but respected for the necessary work they do.
Mary Taylor, 22 years old, was one of us. Though I certainly passed Mary many times, I know nothing about her except this: she was a human being. Her life mattered. Her death matters. She deserved better. And here I am, saying her name.
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
Ryan Carson, an activist idiot who insisted that black criminals go free, got visited by one.
He was accosted & stabbed for merely standing at a bus stop with his girlfriend. Now he won’t be working with Chickenshit Chucky Schumer to inflict more crime on us unwashed masses anymore.
He got to see 1st hand what his advocacy yields – for an agonizing moment, he had a chance to reflect on his own stupidity.
Would he have learned from it? We’ll never know.
Karma’s a bitch.
Perhaps if more leftist assholes get a taste of their bullshit, they’ll reconsider their policy.
My guess is that cosseted politicians like Cori Bush will continue to vote more crime for us, while continuing to spend huge sums on their own security. (i.e. she knows it’s wrong, but doesn’t give a shit.)
Accurate description, I considered myself a socialist until the early 80’s when a drug dealer came to live next door to me and my wife and baby daughter. When I think back, that was my tipping point.
Glad to hear it.
You’ll be glad to hear that 1 BLM gent, and 1 AntiFa guy had the same epiphany.
They’ve both posted videos on Prager U.
(Gotta love a happy ending.)
“In the nineteen sixties, America, following leftist ideology, decided that there are no standards” is true. At the time I dubbed that “The Era of the Institutionalization of the Cop Out.”
“Should you be just? To the contrary, altruism insists that you treat people with mercy, rather than justice. If others are guilty of some wrongdoing, you should offer them absolution, not judgement. Treat them with pity in place of censure. Deal with people based not on what they deserve but on what they NEED.
Altruism’s attitude toward moral principles is sharply illustrated by the following. Some years ago, the campus of New York’s Stonybrook State University became the target of numerous fires, resulting in several million dollars of damage. It turned out that the fires were set by one of the university’s own fire marshals — who had previously been imprisoned for ARSON. While it is not clear whether anyone at the school knew of his criminal record at the time he was hired — he supposedly left blank the line on the application form that asked about criminal history — the university’s chief fire marshal said such knowledge would have made no difference in the hiring decision: “We couldn’t refuse him; that would be discrimination.” That is, it would have been UNALTRUISTIC for the university to be concerned about its own interests in keeping students and faculty safe from dangerous felons. It would have been unaltruistic to treat a criminal as a criminal, since the paramount consideration is supposed to be, not his character, but his acute need for the job.
An even more egregious example occurred at the Honeywell Corporation in Minnesota. There, an employee strangled to death a co-worker, his girlfriend, and was sent to prison for four-and-a-half years. Several weeks after his release the company took him back — only to have him murder another co-worker, who was spurning his romantic overtures. Explaining the decision to re-employ him, a Honeywell spokesman said: “The philosophy we have is that we don’t discriminate when it comes to hiring practices.”
It is true that employers may fear being sued for illegal discrimination if they reject such applicants. But the legal constraints themselves are simply the manifestation of altruism, of its mandate that we SACRIFICE everything, including our moral principles, for the sake of someone in need.” – “In Defense of Selfishness: Why the Code of Self-Sacrifice is Unjust and Destructive” by Peter Schwartz
It was too good to be true. Self-centered people like you never learn, but after a week of THX-free bliss, I see you are back. Not with one but 4 long winded piles of word salad that no one cares about. As if you actually have something important to say.
I was hoping against hope you would have been banned, but I guess it’s not to be. You are the quintessential narcissist, immune from criticism and still in love with the sound of your own voice. No one cares about altruism and Peter Schwartz
And as we move into the future, farther afield from Greenfield’s original 9/29 post I will continue to post it. I suppose you were hoping that, by waiting a week, folks would forget about Greenfield’s epic slap down of you.
So I will post what Greenfield said to you that managed to shut you down for a week:
“Daniel Greenfield says
September 29, 2023 at 9:14 pm
The idea that you and your particular belief system, for which you are an absolutely terrible representative, represent ‘reason’, is as much of a fallacy as the idea that Fauci represents science.
You are only as good as your arguments.”
I was going to comment About the inappropriate comment but I no longer pander to his narcissism.
“For an even more graphic illustration of this imperative, consider the case of Zell Kravinsky, a one-time multi-millionaire who took altruism very seriously.
After acquiring a $45 million fortune in real estate, Kravinsky gave almost all of it to charity. As a friend explained, “He decided the purpose of his life was to give away things.” Still feeling unsatisfied, Kravinsky searched for a further opportunity to make sacrifices. He soon found one — he chose to donate a kidney to a total stranger. He provided this rationale: “The reasons for giving a little are the reasons for giving a lot. And the reasons for a giving a lot are the reasons for giving more.’
His wife vehemently opposed his decision, arguing not only that he was in poor health, but that any of their four children might someday need a transplanted kidney from their father. However, as Abraham did not shrink from sacrificing his offspring, neither did Kravinsky. “I love my children,” he declared. “I really do. But I just can’t say their lives are more valuable than any other life.”
Here we see the altruist’s perverse concept of love put into practice. Kravinsky is talking about HIS children, but since it would be selfish for him to value them above others, he doesn’t. Since authentic love, like any form of valuing, must be discriminating, altruism prohibits it. Just as altruism does not permit the employer to discriminate between the criminal and the non-criminal, so it does not permit a father to discriminate between his child and any other. Clearly, though, if a parent does not deem his own children more important than any other children, he does NOT love them. To “love” everyone equally is to be equally indifferent to all. Yet such appalling indifference is what Zell Kravinsky endorses…. CONTINUED
Kravinsky underwent the risky surgery to remove his kidney strictly as an act of altruism. He dutifully cut away a piece of his life, because he believed that others had a higher claim to it.
It does not matter whether or not Kravinsky was prompted by some neurotic urge. (He made sure to inform the local news media the day of his kidney donation, saying, “I didn’t expect to get the publicity, but I won’t deny that it feeds my vanity.”) The crucial point is that, regardless of his actual motive, he did exactly what a paragon of altruism would do. his behavior was fully in accord with our culture’s code of self-sacrifice.
Or, actually, not quite fully yet . . .
After the operation, Kravinsky expressed a desire to make a greater sacrifice: giving away his other kidney — and more. “My organs could save several people if I gave my whole body away,” he said. “I know it’s a thing I ought to do; other lives are equal to my own, and I could save at least three or four.”
He wanted to become fodder for humanity. If someone needed a kidney, a lung, a cornea, a heart — Kravinsky would offer his, because he believed that the moral justification of an individual’s life is service to others. “I should just give all of me to those who need me, whether it is my body, my money or myself,” he declared….
While civilized society normally shrinks in horror and disgust at stories of cannibalistic tribes who kill their victims in order to eat their flesh, a different view prevails toward the modern version of the same abomination. For here is someone telling us that we ought to offer up our life-preserving body parts for consumption by others — yet no one publicly expressed any moral revulsion. to the contrary, Kravinsky was honored by the Pennsylvania General Assembly for being “a shining example of humanity.”
Kravinsky may have offered his organs voluntarily, but what difference should that make? Whether the act is initiated by the eaters or by the eaten, it remains cannibalism — and it represents the essence of altruism. Whether others are hungry for all your flesh, or desire only your kidneys or merely ask you to pay for their food stamps, your altruistic duty is clear: since you have something they don’t, you must be willing to sacrifice. In the man-eat-man world decreed by altruism, the “have-nots” are granted an insuperable claim on anything you possess. As Kravinsky succinsctly summed up the issue: “No one should have a vacation home until everyone has a place to live. No one should have a second car until everyone has one. And no one should have two kidneys until everyone has one.”
Need — the altruist asserts — overrides everything.” – “In Defense of Selfishness: Why the Code of Self-Sacrifice is Unjust and Destructive” by Peter Schwartz
I want capital punishment for anyone blasting rap from their car whenever I’m stuck in traffic-that would settle the issue of noise pollution.. Denzel Washington owes the world an apology for his portrayal of Hurricane Carter -and a future movie about Mary Taylor. Washington’s portrayal of Carter painted Carter as particularly saintly and Paterson as particularly racist.Carter( with accomplice John Artis) murdered three people in Paterson in 1966-and at least probably shortened one other person’s life in the shooting..It’s the ‘only’ time I ever heard of Paterson-and it isn’t easy to find more evidence of guilt than there is against Carter(graphicwitness.com).
The Bible says different. If you want to be a Christian you become an altruist and do the following:
“Do not judge that ye shall not be judged” – Matthew 7:1
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.” – Matthew 38:40
“But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;” – Matthew 5:44
“But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,… “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” – Luke 6:27-36
Some people never evolve, grow or change. I knew you would double down on stupidity.
“Daniel Greenfield says
September 29, 2023 at 9:14 pm
The idea that you and your particular belief system, for which you are an absolutely terrible representative, represent ‘reason’, is as much of a fallacy as the idea that Fauci represents science.
You are only as good as your arguments.”
“Nuff said”……succinctly.
Hello again THX – you have just given us some terrifying examples of the madness of “the world” in your posts above – as has this article. But please don’t blame Christian teaching for any of this! If everyone was doing their best to follow the Golden Rule, would any of these horrors happen – even though our best is so imperfect at the moment?
Dear Sue, today in modern, secular, times Christians (and Jews) are free to interpret the Bible any way they please and there are many different kinds of opposed and contradictory ways of interpreting Christianity. There is even “Prosperity Theology” Christianity that claims that Jesus really wants you to be rich, prosperous, successful, and happy (Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar, Reverend Ike, Kenneth Copeland, Oral Roberts, Joseph Prince, etc.)
But Ayn Rand’s point is not about that but about man’s moral right to exist for himself versus the moral code of altruism that claims that man’s highest virtue is to be a sacrificial animal for others, that NEED MAKES RIGHT.
Freedom, liberty, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism rest on a moral code of rational self-interest, rational selfishness, that each individual is an end in himself and not the means for the ends of others. If you can incorporate rational selfishness and prosperity theology into your interpretation of Christianity, more power to you.
But, and this is crucial, the professional philosophers and theologians fully know what altruism really means and what it demands. And they are the ones who teach the future leaders of America and the West at their universities.
“Altruism’s proponents exhibit different degrees of understanding of their creed. At the more innocent end of this spectrum are the people who uncritically believe that some of us must be sacrificed so that others, or “society as a whole”, can benefit. But those at the opposite end — the theorists and the intellectuals of altruism, the ones who grasp the full implications of the altruist code, the avid leaders as against the passive followers, the pushers rather than just the users — have a very different motivation. They advocate self-sacrifice, not as the means of benefiting anyone — but as end in itself.” – Peter Schwartz
“Collectivism does not preach sacrifice as a temporary means to some desirable end. Sacrifice is its end—sacrifice as a way of life. It is man’s independence, success, prosperity, and happiness that collectivists wish to destroy.” – Ayn Rand
You go right on existing only for yourself and measuring the worth of everyone else by whether they provide value to and for you.
I see you are racking up the downvotes as usual.
I know, why not start the Objectivist Drag Queen Shows project.
“professional philosophers and theologians”….hmmm.
Oh you mean the ones who actually put in the time and effort to get credentialed, got jobs in academia, were published and actually make a difference in the world of philosophy and theology.
Other than garnering downvote after downvote I wonder what difference you are making.
If I may quote Mr. Greenfield:
“Daniel Greenfield says
September 29, 2023 at 9:14 pm
The idea that you and your particular belief system, for which you are an absolutely terrible representative, represent ‘reason’, is as much of a fallacy as the idea that Fauci represents science.
You are only as good as your arguments.”
Hello THX, and thanks for your reply. I want to assure you that the Bible has one consistent message – from Genesis to Revelation. It is only open to interpretation if you add or subtract things. And this is why we offer a free home Bible study to everyone..
I am trying to remember what I read about Ayn Rand and her philosophy in the Branden book, and something that she is reported as having said about wanting to look into a face – a man’s face I think – that is not… sad/troubled – I can’t remember how she put it, but it did remind me of the New Zealand writer Janet Frame, who (in her autobiography) spoke of “the sadness that belongs to the world”, as something she noted and felt from childhood. And I guess Ayn Rand did too. For sure, many of us do.
Janet Frame wonders why. And even answers her question later in the book, with another question: “Everything should be perfect, why isn’t it?”
Everything should be perfect. Why isn’t it? Genesis answers that question.
The danger is that we might feel we can put this right with some “ism” or another, that we then try to impose on others. It is the Inspired Scriptures that assure us we cannot and we must not. And they also assure us that our Creator, the God of Abraham, can and will. Paradise will be restored, earthwide, but not by any human government.
“Sunday, October 1, I really needed to get away. The rock through the window was just one of a series of mini disasters. I’d recently gotten bad news about my health, and stress has been eating me up.”
Dr. Goska I hope you get better. If there is any way I can help, I’ll help. Maybe a “Go Fund Me” page can be opened?
I’m not rich but I will contribute not out of selfless, self-sacrificial, altruism but out of rational selfishness.
Are you kidding me with this ploy? A Go Fund Me page? Really?
THX: “I will contribute not out of selfless, self-sacrificial, altruism but out of rational selfishness.” You actually have to scientifically explain to anyone why you are helping out. How pathetic is that?
That is the most bizarre attempt to actually get a date. And you still have to calculate the worthiness and value of handing over money, because that is what a good Objectivist does. What you are basically saying is “Are you worthy?
As Kynarion Hellenis said: “It is sick beyond measure to assign transactional value to charity and compassion.”
You didn’t post all week because you got a classic beatdown from management.
Professor, thank you again. Before there can be reform, there must be prophets, who often pay a high price. You are playing the role of prophet, and you are paying.
The cable news I watch had a story yesterday about a CVS store in Washington, D.C. near a school. Every day, both before and after school, students enter the store and literally empty the shelve and walk out without paying. Across the street the stolen goods are on tables being offered for sale. The security guard at the store does, can do, nothing. Police are nowhere to be found.
Yesterday I received from The Catholic League, an organization I modestly support, a book from Bill Donohue, whom I would also describe as a prophet. The book is “War on Virtue, How the Ruling Class is Killing the American Dream.” Like you, Donohue describes the problems with our culture and the fundamental values and virtues needed to address it.
We’re in a bad place, but I pray and hope we will find and follow a better way. God Bless!
I can only agree with everything you said.
Jesus said to give away all your wealth to the poor and follow him, then you would have practiced perfect virtue.
“Just then a man came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?”
Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” – Matthew 19
“Holy Scripture and the Welfare State” – Richard M. Salsman
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardsalsman/2011/04/28/holy-scripture-and-the-welfare-state/?sh=3ee2b59f24f2
Cope and pasted direct from THX’s notecard #24 for the 1,000,000th time. In the final analysis you really don’t have a lot to say. You are devolving into a classic narcissist bore.
We need Gang Control not Gun Control
Every year in America, some 500 whites are murdered by black assailants, more than twice as many as blacks killed by whites. The media need to report all of these cases fairly and without bias so as to counter the false reporting and misplaced emphasis in the national press. All victims, of whatever race, deserve justice because all human life is precious. The reporting of violence should not be based on race — it should be proportionate to the crime, without regard to the race of the perpetrator or the victim. Jeffrey Folks
///
D.C. CRIME
More than 90% of homicide victims and homicide suspects in 2019 and 2020 were male, and about 96% were Black. Nearly half were formerly incarcerated, and about 86% of them were known to the criminal justice system in some way. And, the study found, victims in homicides and suspects in these cases were “remarkably similar” when it came to prior arrests. Most had been arrested for property crimes, drug crimes, and unarmed violent offenses prior to the shooting or homicide, and had on average been arrested approximately 11 times.
///
“In Washington, D.C., most gun violence is very
tightly concentrated on a small number of very
high risk young Black male adults that have a
shared set of common risk factors,” says David
Muhammad, the executive director of the National
Institute for Criminal Justice Reform. “This very
small number of high risk individuals are
identifiable. Their violence is predictable and
therefore it is preventable.”
Another essay that combines plain speaking with eloquence. One heart-wrenching fact I would add: if I have my facts straight, Mary Taylor was nine months pregnant.
I understand that this article is about issues bigger than life in the not so great part of Patterson, NJ, but if that were all the article were about, it is still a fascinating description of a world. A world I’ve never experienced.
There is a simple solution to moving groups of undesirables. It may not cure other issues but
would be a start.
Go to an outdoors store and find the hunting department. Select products like skunk odor,
coyote urine and other odious products meant to mask the human scent of hunters.
Sprinkle them around the area you want vacated …sit back and watch.
Unless the attendees smell worse than the products they will move to other locations.
The other activities will likely move as well.
This is a simple non violent action that will not endanger anyone – assuming the
area is empty when the products are spread around.
Ms. Goska, why do you still live there??? (BTW, I really enjoy your essays.)
Maybe some people can’t afford to live anywhere else or maybe some people cannot afford a car and have to live where there is mass transportation. It does not matter the circumstances for Dr. Goska’s living arrangements, What does matter is that she is able to give an honest evaluation of the problems with inner city living from her personal observations. What has been tried for the last sixty years is not working so maybe it is time to address the problem differently.
Thank you. You understand.
This is one of the most moving articles I’ve seen on FPM. I feel your pain and realise how lucky I am to live in a small town in the UK.
Whenever I work in any city I despair at the downward spiral that mass immigration, hedonism, and poverty is causing.
Always I am grateful to come home.
Since the enforced lockdowns many people are leaving the cities and coming to live here, I pray that they don’t bring their bad habits with them.
Thank you for your wonderful words. Ask FPM for a pay raise and get the hell out of there.
Danusha, thank you for this essay, it struck a chord in me. I have moved around a lot as a kid, and as an adult. While in the Navy, my ship was in dry-dock at Hunters Point south of San Francisco, and you could hear the gun fights, and see the car fires from the flight deck while in the dock. Later, I lived on the corner of E14th and 9th Avenue in Oakland. It was interesting, and loud. This was in the late 1980’s. But it was not as bad as some of the less culturally neighborhoods in Oakland. I found, at least in that part of Oakland, the higher the level of integration, the less violence I would see. I was commuting to a job outside of Oakland at the time, east of Castro Valley.
I know people who live near Grizzly Peak, and along the Oakland Hills. Those I know are unaware of things outside of their sphere. They pass these neighborhoods every day, the Leftist Potemkin Villages, living billboards for the elite, who know none of the faces, names or lives of those behind the façades. I read a book by Aaron Wildavsky titled “Implementation: How Great Expectation in Washington are Dashed in Oakland; or, Why It’s Amazing that Federal Programs Work at All.” It was about LBJ’s little experiment in Oakland, and it opened my eyes.
The standards wars have been raging for at least 30 years. I remember one time, in 1993, when we were informed of a new person coming to the engineering team. We were told that the interview process had been changed, and that the candidate no longer had to prove they could do the job. Instead, we had to prove they could not do the job. It was what my father’s generation called an ‘affirmative action hire.’ Lower the standards and the lowered results are now lowering the standards of where ever the lowered standards now reside. I think that to lower the bar any more, you’ll need a shovel. This is good news for the identity ideology, but not so good when you consider that we are facing a problem that I have heard anthropologists call ‘loss of craft specialization.’ Plenty of people in jobs, and fewer that can work the problem. I see this today where I work.
Thank you for putting a face to the name of Mary Taylor, and letting us know what you knew about her, which is a lot. This is a heartbreaking story, but I think you honored her memory.