NYC Descending Into Chaos

Okay, that may be a bit extreme, but it is only a little over the top. Big Apple's core is rotten with crime: experts, biz owners

Major crimes in the Midtown South have skyrocketed 44% as of Feb. 5 compared to the same time last year, with 412 incidents vs. 287, according to the NYPD.

The staggering jump in crime outpaces the total incidents for the city, which increased just 2.6%.

Midtown South includes all the places you would go if you went to NYC. Times Square, Madison Square Garden, etc.

“It’s kind of a race to the bottom. I don’t know if they don’t have enough cops or they just don’t care,” said a concerned 44-year-old Manhattan business owner, who declined to give his name.

“The mentally ill aren’t being addressed, there’s open air drug use and it’s all symptomatic,” he continued. “The ironic thing is this is the commercial corridor of the city. This is the heart of what New York is known for . . . The city isn’t doing a lot to clean this up.”

The city isn't doing anything, because doing "something" to fight crime would be mean, or unfair. Keeping violent people in jail? Unfair. Prosecuting people for shoplifting? Mean. Enhancing Law and Order? This is a Progressive™ city, not a conservative one!

Felony assaults in Midtown South have surged 115%, up to 56 from 26; while robberies have spiked 59%, with 59 compared to from 37.

Also, grand larcenies are up 39% (to 237 from 170); burglaries climbed 10% (to 53 from 48), and auto thefts zoomed 20%

Some of that can be chalked up to what in statistics is known as the problem of small numbers, but not all of it can be brushed off. Things are bad and getting worse. The politicians apparently can't be bothered to make things better, and at both the city and state levels seem determined to make things worse.

These kinds of stories always bring to mind the poem "The Second Coming," by William Butler Yeats. Find the whole thing after the break. One part of the first stanza is:

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;

Which seems apropos somehow. 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.

There has been much talk about how things happening in Western Civilization today are reminiscent of Wiemar Germany of the 1930s. Personally I think it seems more like Rome before the Vandals. I hope I'm wrong. Civilization is built on, and depends on the Rule of Law. Politicians seem determined to undermine that.