On Slippery Slopes

progressive sh*tholes and what comes next

About an hour ago, I saw the top of a slippery slope. It made my blood run cold.

I got in the car and called the one person I knew wouldn’t judge me for my horror.

He wasn’t available to talk, so I came home and started writing, to clarify my thoughts.

If you’re reading this, I decided to publish them.

Schrödinger’s Fallacy

The “slippery slope” is a troublesome concept.

It’s considered a logical fallacy, and always listed as such in discussions of reasoning. And this is both appropriate, and not.

I’ve seen a noticeable uptick lately in certain political tribes, mostly libertarians, applying the slippery slope to an absurd degree. They argue against allowing the government to remove even egregiously abused children—children who are being pimped out for drugs, beaten, starved, or otherwise abused in obvious ways—since “if the government can decide that, then the government can take your kids away for being Christian or atheist or other things you don’t want the government to decide!” That children are human and some vulnerable humans need protection from psychopathic monsters, regardless of genetic connection, seems irrelevant to these folks—the danger of the slippery slope trumps all other considerations in their minds.

Relying overmuch on the slippery slope metaphor is bad reasoning. You can believe that some people—people who are properly trained, educated, licensed, insured, and have obtained informed consent—should be allowed to cut people with knives (we call them “surgeons”) without putting yourself or society at risk of believing that everyone should be allowed to cut anyone with a knife, at will.

But some slopes are quite slippery, often in ways we don’t want to think about. The example that springs to mind first, for me, is another one related to children—the battle over letting children who are confused about their gender begin a transition process. I can find no rationale for why a 13 year old girl can consent to having an adult surgically remove her breasts but not fondle them, or why she can consent to taking medication that will cause her vagina to become atrophied, but not to having her vagina penetrated.

I do not mean to ignore boys in this equation; I bring up girls only because girls reach puberty younger than boys. I was 9 when I reached puberty, a tomboy who desperately wanted to be a boy. In 2024, the 9-year-old version of me would be allowed to take puberty blockers under most of the medical standards of care that apply to American kids. Being permitted to “consent” to not-fully-reversible, serious, elective medical intervention at 9 is simply incompatible with the concept of protecting kids from pedophiles and others who believe that 9-year-olds can and should be allowed to consent to sexual activity.

Progressive Shitholes

I live in deeply rural Vermont, and often travel to the more populous areas of the state to shop, eat out, and see my therapist.

Burlington has become a progressive shithole, one that keeps the cops and fire fighters busy doing Narcan OD reversals constantly. Despite a population of under 50,000 people, Burlington authorities often do as many Narcan reversals in a typical day as Detroit or other urban centers that are far larger.

I am not remotely unaware or unsympathetic about the plight of opioid addicts, or the absolutely brutal suffering that withdrawal causes. I get it. But having the government facilitate this slow form of suicide — as the city of Burlington does, funding clean needles and providing safe injection sites — is morally deranged.

I don’t know what the answers are, and I don’t claim to. But it’s absolutely not this.

Humans respond to incentives. You get more of what you subsidize, and this tiny little state is subsidizing addiction. Little wonder that it’s skyrocketing.

I used to go downtown to hang out at the studio and watch my buddy

Josh Slocum

film his podcast sometimes. It gradually got scarier and scarier, including a few times when I brought lunch and had homeless people try to intimidate me into giving them the food I was carrying.

He had a scary experience at an ATM and realized that if he was unsafe alone, I certainly was, and we mutually agreed that I would only come to the studio if he or Kevin was available to meet me at the parking garage and escort me back and forth.

The shoplifting crisis is out of control, largely because the Chittenden County State’s Attorney doesn’t believe in prosecuting most property crimes.

The Stench Spreads

So I’ve been staying out of Burlington for awhile now, but still enjoying some of the neighboring areas that offer shopping and restaurants. They all seemed far enough away from Burlington — in Vermont terms, anything under a 30 minute drive is close, and I’m a good deal farther than that from Burlington — to be safe.

But that’s changing.

Walmart now locks up all the toys behind glass, and not just the expensive toys like LEGO sets — all of them. The Shaw’s keeps laundry detergent and other expensive items locked up, too.

CVS, Staples, and the art supply store I like best have all recently changed their bathroom policies. To use the bathroom at any of these places, in addition to being a paying customer, one must now be escorted by an employee.

This is embarrassing, as often the employee must announce to everyone waiting line that he or she will be right back, once they have escorted you to the bathroom.

If it is meant to discourage requests, well, it works. I’ve ordered a couple of things on Amazon that I normally would’ve bought locally since this change.

The more “upscale” shopping areas — the LL Bean, the Whole Foods, the old-fashioned toy store, the REI, and the restaurants interspersed among them — are still pretty nice, and of course people only enter restaurants to eat, so I was not anticipating changes in these areas anytime soon.

I was wrong.

What Happened Today

I had therapy this morning. After my session, I took myself out to lunch, which I often do during the warm months. I ate slowly, processed what my therapist and I had discussed, and wrote in my journal.

As I left the restaurant, I saw a homeless-looking man sitting on the ground, slumped against the building.

My first instinct was to do an immediate threat assessment and make a plan. If he was overdosing, I would call 911 and then go back into the restaurant to see if anyone had Narcan. If no one did and the ambulance wasn’t there yet, I would go to the store next to the restaurant and try again. I don’t know how to administer Narcan myself, but I also wouldn’t walk away and leave a human being to die if I could prevent it. Asking the shopkeepers if anyone had Narcan and could help him is quite literally the least I could do.

He wasn’t overdosing. He was napping. Perhaps he sensed my presence as I stepped a bit closer, because he woke up.

He smiled at me, then moved the object he was resting against, which turned out to be a guitar case. He removed his guitar and began playing and singing after moving the case so that it was open and angled towards me in the way that implied that I should be dropping money into it.

It was just what the Burlington street performers do — but it’s legal and licensed on Church Street, in downtown Burlington, to do this.

To my knowledge—and I did check when I got to the car—where I was, it was illegal. I noticed uncomfortable glances from several other people who were coming and going from the various places of business.

As I got to my car, I turned and watched the man. He had a confrontational look on his face as he played. Then he stopped, pointed at the case, and said something to a man who had stopped. The man walked on.

Nobody will call the police on this guy — nobody.

Why?

Yes, Vermont is Woke AF, and that’s part of it.

But the main reason is that the guy was black. It is an article of faith in Blue America that calling the police on a black man, especially if you are a white woman while making the call, constitutes attempted murder.

I doubt that I would call the police on a black man for anything short of a now-I-need-medical-attention level of assault or attempted rape, because I have to live here and the consequences could be dramatic, severe, and long-lasting.

I would weigh those consequences against whatever immediate injustice I had suffered.

That makes me a coward on one level, and I plead guilty.

On another level, it’s just common sense. Committing something that one’s neighbors universally regard as a moral crime is not to be done lightly. I live alone and have no family support network to rely on.

None of the business owners will call the cops. Nor will any of them make, or even ask, the guy to leave. The optics of calling the cops on a black guy are just too terrible.

I could be wrong, of course, but I doubt it.

What It Means

The consequences of this are entirely predictable.

The area will quickly attract more of this behavior. Beyond the relatively tame type of panhandling that this represents, it will get worse in a hurry.

The concept of “broken windows” policing is a controversial one. It’s essentially a law enforcement strategy based on the idea that addressing small crimes and signs of disorder—things like panhandling, vandalism, loitering, or public intoxication—can help prevent more serious crimes.

The theory behind it posits that visible signs of neglect and disorder—like broken windows, hence the name—can signal to potential criminals that an area is not closely monitored or cared for, goes on to incentivize criminal behavior.

As with most things in life, it can be taken too far. Nobody wants tickets for jaywalking or spitting out gum. We aren’t Singapore, and don’t want to be.

But I believe I’ve seen the consequences of going too far in the other direction.

And I believe they’re spreading.

I could be wrong. I could be catastrophizing mightily.

I’m very, very good at that. It’s a defense mechanism from my early childhood, when failure to anticipate the worst case scenario was always a terrible mistake.

So maybe this is my trauma talking. Maybe in the spring, around the time I stop going straight home from therapy and start going out to lunch again, Substack — or one of you — will remind me of this post, and I’ll get to write something funny and self-deprecating about the time I panicked and prophesied doom.

Maybe.

I hope so.

But I doubt it.

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