“The best lack all conviction”

And this article brings us the most ironic school name in New York City. Greenwich Village block held hostage by lunchtime rowdies

The rowdy kids are students at Harvest Collegiate High School. Go figure.

A band of foul-mouthed, toy gun-waving, pot-puffing high school hooligans are keeping residents of West 13th off 6th Avenue hostage in their own tony homes, terrified denizens told The Post.

For at least a year while school is in session, the roughnecks roam from stoop to stoop every day at lunchtime, rolling blunts, getting high, acting out and taunting anyone who gets in their way.

Talking to the school has done nothing. The word "parents" never appears in the article, though it does show up in the comments to the article. The cops have notified the school, and done nothing else. Just another indication that NYPD has given up in the face of DAs who won't prosecute. So do the residents of New York City miss the whole Broken Windows policing initiatives yet?

The residents of the neighborhood are upset with the kids, and worried that they will be shot because they are waving toy guns at people. My guess is that in a few years they won't be using toy guns, but real ones. But even toy guns can get you killed if someone is convinced that they are real.

Major crimes in the 6th Precinct are up 72% this year, NYPD stats show. Felony assaults climbed 7% (142 from 133) and robberies 47% (186 from 127), while petty larcenies rose 60% (1,467 from 917). Grand larcenies have soared 91% (976 from 510) and burglary has skyrocketed 96% (325 from 166), the NYPD stats through Sept. 25 show.

So the cops can do nothing. The schools can do nothing, apparently. The parents will apparently do nothing. And so the kids are free to roam the streets, basically terrorizing the neighborhood. As time goes by, and they suffer no consequences for their actions, their behavior will get worse. That is human nature.

And while this story is about one group of kids from one school, the statistics on the increase in crime show what is happening to the entire neighborhood/city/state.

The title to this post is drawn from the poem "The Second Coming," by William Butler Yeats. The line is, " The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity." The entire text of the poem, it isn't long, can be found below (after the break).

Civilization was nice while it lasted.

The Second Coming
  — W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

It was written in 1919, after the First World War.