There are exceptions. One is being second district in Maine. We are non-woke here and There is little danger of being seen as politically incorrect. Many people have Trump signs in their front yard. Coincidentally we have relatively little crime. My suburban town doesn’t even have or need a police department!
Oh you're not wrong or catastrophizing this very real and growing situation, across America.
The same could be said about high density housing, being intentionally put in the middle of single family zoned neighborhoods, because...human rights and equity. Many dare not point out the statistics, that show packing more people in lower income housing is a recipe for disaster, especially for those whose neighborhoods have been well cared for and maintained because of investments of time and money, on the long term. You cannot mention the marked and trackable increased traffic (vehicle and foot), increased home and vehicle break-ins, trespassing, crime in places of business and these high density bastions of equity. Not to mention the drug problem increasing.
Now for all the bleeding hearts out there, every single person in those HD buildings may be saints, except for one. And that one will bring others who perpetuate the crime and chaos that no one will stop or police - because of the reasons you mentioned Holly.
The broken windows theory/practice was only necessary because people stopped teaching their children to be good, respectful and considerate citizens. However, if people refuse to shoulder this most basic of responsibilities, but still want to live in safe, nice and peaceful communities, then it is needed.
This will spread, in direct proportion to the liberal/progressive agenda in a given town, city, state or country. When the legislative/ruling bodies are captured and the people give up trying to change that reality (understandably so) then the slippery slope becomes real and oiled by those who would profit from the chaos and dysfunction of a given community/society/country. Imagine the money and power being reaped, just in Burlington, by facilitating the addiction industry.
Just as in the healthcare industry, there is no profit or power in having a healthy, well functioning society that can run itself.
Thank you as always for prompting me to think critically! Regarding slippery slopes: I have poor depth perception and balance issues. I’m extra careful when going out at night and walking on slippery, uneven terrain or steep hills. My main fears are not being able to stop falling once I’ve started, and not being able to get up if I have. Also, I freeze when startled. It might not take much, just a slight misstep, to incur real damage. See where this is going?
I’m from the NJ/NYC area, now in the CA Bay Area, and I have street smarts and a ‘subway face’ expression that works to deter strangers. Yet I’m actually more afraid of the slippery slopes all around me in CA, because they’re so random and seemingly acceptable, mid week, mid day, even in small towns or beautiful surroundings with ‘Be Kind’ signs.
Anytime I hear someone respond "slippery slope!" to a very valid point(s), what I hear is "shut up". (It's the same when something or someone is slapped with the conspiracy label.)
It takes hard work to think critically about all the shades of gray of which life is composed, and I am under no illusions about the lack of capacity for critical thinking in our fellow humans in toto; and cognitive dissonance compounds the shit show. Can't be uncomfortable now, can we? A slippery slope often whooses one into the pesky consequences zone, and we know that our society is angling for - being nudged? shoved? - consequence-free existences. It all feels very nihilistic to me.
I've been called a pessimist so many times, and I always respond, "I prefer realist." No. You are not catastrophizing. I think you're being a realist.
“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.”
I must respectfully disagree a little here as this policing/public order practice does indeed work. William Bratton and other police officials proved it does work in NYC, LA and multiple other cities. Crime went down and individual and collective liberties were maintained. Everyone, except criminals, benefits when metropolitan areas are protected by active and engaged policing and community involvement.
I agree that anything can be taken to extremes, but I do not believe the slippery slope is real here. What you describe in Burlington and what we see around the country is, as you note, the exact opposite of public order. One look no further than NYC, LA, San Francisco or Minneapolis to see where this goes.
Your thesis is, in part, about slippery slopes, yes?
My understanding here is that you are concerned about the extremes of either approach - broken windows or the opposite. Valid concerns because far too many people are living with the consequences of “restorative justice”, which is the true slippery slope of post-modern progressivism. The opposite can also occur, clearly, and we can all live without a new world police state (e.g. China and a number of other places) but I do not see it as likely now.
God. You make me want to never write again. I am absolutely baffled as to how you got the idea that I am worried about the extreme in the direction of too much policing. I have no business writing if I fail this miserably, that readers literally walk away with the precise opposite impression of the one I intend to leave. You’re not far from convincing me to stop writing entirely. How I try very hard to say X and convince you I was trying to say not-X is a mystery that indicates I’m in way over my head. So much for the books, plural, I want to write.
Please, help. How can I be more clear? When I said that I had seen the top of a slippery slope and it made my blood run cold, should I have clarified that my blood runs cold over things I am scared about? That it does not run cold in fear of the opposite of the thing I have seen? When I said that nobody wants to be Singapore, should I have clarified that I am included in the nobody? That Singapore is one extreme and that I am not at all remotely worried about that extreme, which is why I only mentioned it in passing and trivially? Should I have spent two or three paragraphs explaining that Singapore is one extreme and I am not worried about that extreme? Would that have made it clear? At the end, when I said that I might be wrong, and even fantasized about the possibility of being wrong, should I have clarified that I meant that I might be wrong in that my worrying that the extreme of no policing, the only extreme I thought I was communicating fear and relating multiple personal experiences about, was going to make things worse? Would that have made it clear? What did I do so wrong here that you walked away thinking I argued the EXACT AND PRECISE OPPOSITE of what I thought I argued?
I humbly apologize for misunderstanding and misinterpreting your thesis. Clearly I misread things and focused incorrectly on portion I quoted and not on the totality of your piece. I really regret causing you any distress.
It's serendipity for me that you posted this today. I just got back from Burlington on a business trip (from Minnesota) and was considering writing about it. It seemed insane to me, and others with me, that the people of Burlington willing turned their once charming tourist/college area into a massive junkie camp. My group and I walked from our hotel down to Church Street once and then decided never to walk around downtown again. The situation in Burlington mirrors that of Minneapolis - a self-inflicted fatal wound in the name of equality. It's almost as if people are caught up in a religious frenzy. How can they not see reality?
I am a former junky - I was once a meth and heroin addict. I was broken and homeless. I am none of these things now. Now I work to help those who come from places I came from.
I agree with much of your assessment. It breaks my heart to see.
I thank God for the consequences that drove me to seek help in the middle of my hell. Sometimes, life moves at the speed of pain.
I read this before I headed out for my evening dog walk, and I just re-read it, in an effort to gather my thoughts about it. I don’t usually walk the dog after dark but life got in the way and I came home late. We did not take our usual evening route, but that’s only because I dislike using streets with no sidewalks after dark. We did about a mile and half, sometimes on sidewalks with no street lights. We passed or met several other walkers, both white and black, on the way. At no time did I have any apprehension of impeding problems. I felt safe.
I wish I knew *why* my experience of life is so different than yours — why I am unafraid to walk the streets of my town after dark. Why there is no violent crime and no open conflict here. I wish there was a mathematical formula: you need to reduce X by 15% and multiply Y by Z^2. But I don’t think it works like that. There’s plenty of petty property crime here: if you leave a bicycle or an expensive tool in the front yard, you’re not entitled to be surprised if it’s gone the next morning. Construction sites have copper lifted all the time. But occupied houses don’t get broken into; there’s no car theft and a carjacking would be a 50-year event; there hasn’t been a rape, a battery, or an arson in the ten years I’ve lived here. There *was* one homicide: originally charged as murder, it was eventually settled as involuntary manslaughter. It was a dispute between two men — known to each other — over a woman, that got out of hand. It was the first time it had happened here in thirty years. And most relevant to your tale: there is no panhandling, no visible homeless presence, and no open drug use (other than the wafting aroma of weed, which is perfectly legal here). Amazon packages don’t get lifted from front porches!
Maybe it’s because we are both relatively small (town population ~ 4000) *and* the county seat (which means the courthouse, the county jail, and the sheriff’s office are here, in addition to our town police force)? That doesn’t seem like a sufficient reason.
It's exactly the progression that unfolded in the SF bay area and the Portland area, both of which I was unfortunate enough to be present to see. There's a variety of "compassion" that is neither libertarian nor liberal, but masquerades as both--it's a rent-seeking racket by organizations that vend and distribute "aid" to such populations in the form of the needles, the narcan, the "social services," etc. Last I checked (ten or so years ago) the city of SF was spending hundreds of millions per year on such "aid" that incentivized all the worst aspects of the situations.
These things don't happen by accident. There's a LOT of money being sponged off the taxpayers to make things this bad, and a LOT of corruption and kickbacks for city leaders that keep the industry happening and growing and making such places a magnet for these problems. It's intentional, and very profitable. And it's horrific for everyone except the people getting rich off it.
Someone, I don't remember who now, recently posted a link to Tom Wolfe's masterful essay on SF, "Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers." I had read it probably 35 years ago, when it would have already been a generation old. And yet it perfectly describes and anticipates the current situation, in which the federal government provides incentives and means for bad actors to assail local governments into impotent submission.
A fantastic essay. SF has been on this path a LONG time, starting all the way back with Jim Jones, who built the city's homelessness-industrial complex before he left for Guyana in order to get out of town ahead of scrutiny over corruption, kickbacks, and other shady shit. SF power brokers drank the proverbial kool-aid long before Jonestown residents were forced, at gunpoint, to drink the poisoned Flavor-Aid in their act of Marxist revolutionary suicide.
I tend to have Libertarian instincts, but my focus is natural rights. On your point at the beginning of your essay, I don't think about slopes, but rather lines. What bothers me about proposals of the dialectical Left is that they don't seem to recognize lines, and they seem to intentionally blur those lines. That blurring of lines does lead to the slippery slope reaction because we know that when the Left dances around the reasonable to justify the unreasonable, it is very tough to trust the outcome of anything they propose. Case in point: weapomuzing child welfare services to justify their over-the-top butchery. Very real abuse cases must be addressed, but the Progressive blurring of definition of abuse to include the absurd and dangerous causes the natural distrust and extreme reaction. It's intentional and demoralizing.
The way I see it the West is squandering the social capital it has taken thousands of years to develop. Discrimination - the ability to distinguish slippery slopes from minor issues - is critical and your reaction to the use of the people who are paid to uphold public order to save people who are being enabled to take fatal drugs and not allowed to uphold public order is just plain sensible. Chaos is already the case. At the ATM, at the restaurant. I went to Bellows Falls High School in the fifties. Public order here in Western Australia today is just as solid as it was back in those days. And please don't be so hard on yourself - it is just in the nature of things people take the written word differently than intended sincerely or otherwise - and congratulations on your new job.
I just re-read the opening of the essay and I would say it wasn't clear at the beginning, AS I READ IT FOR THE FIRST TIME, where you were going with exploring the difficulties of slippery slope thinking. But it becomes perfectly clear when your wrote "But some slopes are quite slippery". Perhaps, and I mean exactly that, your counter example of extreme libertarians might have made some readers think you were going in the direction of dismissing your reactions as mistaken slippery slope thinking when you actually wanted to discuss a series of interrelated examples of a serious social decay. A really dangerous situation. You are not talking about catastrophizing or a tipping point but a mature situation that is already well out of control. Our whole Western Culture has gone through the looking glass and the Red Queen tells us daily that words mean what we want them to mean. Just like some of her Jesters want you make numbers mean what they want them to mean.
Right. But all of that involves bad faith. But when someone who reads me in good faith walks away thinking that I said the exact opposite of what I intended to say, I can only conclude that I have no business writing. Jesus Christ.
When I was a freshman at Columbia in 1960 in an introductory English class full of very bright young men, many of them brighter than me, I was the only one who got it that Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal was satirical. You know the one where he suggested the the solution to the problem of excess Irish babies was for the rich to eat them and then assured his readers that he did not have a pecuniary interest in the scheme as he had no children and his wife was past child bearing. The teacher managed to shut me up before I spilled the beans but it was a sobering experience. You are an excellent writer - noticeably better than myself - and you say you are backing off because of work commitments. That sounds sensible to me. It is a bad faith atmosphere today. I felt you were right to back off direct political commentary because of that atmosphere. Despite the fact I enjoyed participating in it - it is not good for me either. I'm off to the Buddhist monastery to meditate and wishing you healthy dose of equanimity. :-)
It is so easy for us humans to react to complicated problems in ways that turn out to be simplistic and to create more negative outcomes than solutions.
I read these and shudder along with you and all non-demoralised Americans.
Your description of the gradual progress towards inhospitable neighbourhoods paints a clear picture for me. It's incredibly sad to hear about the decline of another charming US city.
It also makes me wonder about the impact on first responders like firefighters having to prevent drug overdoses. This isn't what they signed up for. Operating outside one's chosen professional role can be demoralising and drive a different kind of burnout.
FWIW, I believe this is one of the major problems in education—taking on roles that we never should have taken on (though there are way too many teachers who WANT to take on these roles).
The situation you describe is so frustrating. Partly because it is so easy to diffuse.
Here's an example from my classroom. Every teacher I know gets fed up with student work that is unreadable. Except me. Here's why I don't have the problem:
1. I tell the students on the first day of class that if they turn in something that is sloppy, they will have to re-do it.
2. I follow through. The first week, I usually get about 3-5 kids who turn in something that is terrible. I have a bright red stamp that says: "This looks like garbage. Re-do." I stamp the assignment, and then the students miss recess or PE to re-do the assignment.
3. All it takes is 1-2 times for the students to see that I am serious about this, and nobody turns in sloppy junk ever again.
And notice that this policy isn't mean. Sure, it may feel mean to the guilty kids at first. I always get a couple break-downs over this that first week of school. But once that is over, the kids see that I'm actually helping them improve (one of the biggest sources of mistakes in math, for example, is sloppy work that makes simple operations impossible because the kids can't read their own writing). They are better off with the high expectations, and it doesn't take long for them to realize it. It doesn't take long for some of the sloppiest kids to feel excited that, for the first time in their lives, they have work that they can be proud of.
This is what COULD happen regarding the slippery slope you see in Vermont. But from how you describe your communities, far too many people seem caught up in the "I want to be compassionate" mantra to fix the problem. Even though there is nothing compassionate at all in enabling, encouraging, and cheering on dysfunction.
And I certainly understand why you reacted as you did. It's pretty easy to imagine that if you call the police about this man, you'd find yourself the subject of a story on the news the next day.
Yep. Having seen what happens to white women who call the police who are legitimately being threatened by black men ("I'm going to do what I'm going to do and you're not going to like it....") I would not do so until I needed medical attention as a consequence of whatever had just occurred. Sad but true.
There are exceptions. One is being second district in Maine. We are non-woke here and There is little danger of being seen as politically incorrect. Many people have Trump signs in their front yard. Coincidentally we have relatively little crime. My suburban town doesn’t even have or need a police department!
Oh you're not wrong or catastrophizing this very real and growing situation, across America.
The same could be said about high density housing, being intentionally put in the middle of single family zoned neighborhoods, because...human rights and equity. Many dare not point out the statistics, that show packing more people in lower income housing is a recipe for disaster, especially for those whose neighborhoods have been well cared for and maintained because of investments of time and money, on the long term. You cannot mention the marked and trackable increased traffic (vehicle and foot), increased home and vehicle break-ins, trespassing, crime in places of business and these high density bastions of equity. Not to mention the drug problem increasing.
Now for all the bleeding hearts out there, every single person in those HD buildings may be saints, except for one. And that one will bring others who perpetuate the crime and chaos that no one will stop or police - because of the reasons you mentioned Holly.
The broken windows theory/practice was only necessary because people stopped teaching their children to be good, respectful and considerate citizens. However, if people refuse to shoulder this most basic of responsibilities, but still want to live in safe, nice and peaceful communities, then it is needed.
This will spread, in direct proportion to the liberal/progressive agenda in a given town, city, state or country. When the legislative/ruling bodies are captured and the people give up trying to change that reality (understandably so) then the slippery slope becomes real and oiled by those who would profit from the chaos and dysfunction of a given community/society/country. Imagine the money and power being reaped, just in Burlington, by facilitating the addiction industry.
Just as in the healthcare industry, there is no profit or power in having a healthy, well functioning society that can run itself.
Thank you as always for prompting me to think critically! Regarding slippery slopes: I have poor depth perception and balance issues. I’m extra careful when going out at night and walking on slippery, uneven terrain or steep hills. My main fears are not being able to stop falling once I’ve started, and not being able to get up if I have. Also, I freeze when startled. It might not take much, just a slight misstep, to incur real damage. See where this is going?
I’m from the NJ/NYC area, now in the CA Bay Area, and I have street smarts and a ‘subway face’ expression that works to deter strangers. Yet I’m actually more afraid of the slippery slopes all around me in CA, because they’re so random and seemingly acceptable, mid week, mid day, even in small towns or beautiful surroundings with ‘Be Kind’ signs.
Slippery slopes can be sudden and steep.
Anytime I hear someone respond "slippery slope!" to a very valid point(s), what I hear is "shut up". (It's the same when something or someone is slapped with the conspiracy label.)
It takes hard work to think critically about all the shades of gray of which life is composed, and I am under no illusions about the lack of capacity for critical thinking in our fellow humans in toto; and cognitive dissonance compounds the shit show. Can't be uncomfortable now, can we? A slippery slope often whooses one into the pesky consequences zone, and we know that our society is angling for - being nudged? shoved? - consequence-free existences. It all feels very nihilistic to me.
I've been called a pessimist so many times, and I always respond, "I prefer realist." No. You are not catastrophizing. I think you're being a realist.
“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.”
I must respectfully disagree a little here as this policing/public order practice does indeed work. William Bratton and other police officials proved it does work in NYC, LA and multiple other cities. Crime went down and individual and collective liberties were maintained. Everyone, except criminals, benefits when metropolitan areas are protected by active and engaged policing and community involvement.
I agree that anything can be taken to extremes, but I do not believe the slippery slope is real here. What you describe in Burlington and what we see around the country is, as you note, the exact opposite of public order. One look no further than NYC, LA, San Francisco or Minneapolis to see where this goes.
Where did I say that I don't support it or that it doesn't work?
Your thesis is, in part, about slippery slopes, yes?
My understanding here is that you are concerned about the extremes of either approach - broken windows or the opposite. Valid concerns because far too many people are living with the consequences of “restorative justice”, which is the true slippery slope of post-modern progressivism. The opposite can also occur, clearly, and we can all live without a new world police state (e.g. China and a number of other places) but I do not see it as likely now.
God. You make me want to never write again. I am absolutely baffled as to how you got the idea that I am worried about the extreme in the direction of too much policing. I have no business writing if I fail this miserably, that readers literally walk away with the precise opposite impression of the one I intend to leave. You’re not far from convincing me to stop writing entirely. How I try very hard to say X and convince you I was trying to say not-X is a mystery that indicates I’m in way over my head. So much for the books, plural, I want to write.
Please, help. How can I be more clear? When I said that I had seen the top of a slippery slope and it made my blood run cold, should I have clarified that my blood runs cold over things I am scared about? That it does not run cold in fear of the opposite of the thing I have seen? When I said that nobody wants to be Singapore, should I have clarified that I am included in the nobody? That Singapore is one extreme and that I am not at all remotely worried about that extreme, which is why I only mentioned it in passing and trivially? Should I have spent two or three paragraphs explaining that Singapore is one extreme and I am not worried about that extreme? Would that have made it clear? At the end, when I said that I might be wrong, and even fantasized about the possibility of being wrong, should I have clarified that I meant that I might be wrong in that my worrying that the extreme of no policing, the only extreme I thought I was communicating fear and relating multiple personal experiences about, was going to make things worse? Would that have made it clear? What did I do so wrong here that you walked away thinking I argued the EXACT AND PRECISE OPPOSITE of what I thought I argued?
I humbly apologize for misunderstanding and misinterpreting your thesis. Clearly I misread things and focused incorrectly on portion I quoted and not on the totality of your piece. I really regret causing you any distress.
It's not your fault. I'm fine. I take being read by strangers too seriously. That's on me.
Actually it is my fault and I will endeavor to review what I post more carefully, so it is consistent with what you and others actually wrote.
Holly,
It's serendipity for me that you posted this today. I just got back from Burlington on a business trip (from Minnesota) and was considering writing about it. It seemed insane to me, and others with me, that the people of Burlington willing turned their once charming tourist/college area into a massive junkie camp. My group and I walked from our hotel down to Church Street once and then decided never to walk around downtown again. The situation in Burlington mirrors that of Minneapolis - a self-inflicted fatal wound in the name of equality. It's almost as if people are caught up in a religious frenzy. How can they not see reality?
Before I respond, allow me to qualify.
I am a former junky - I was once a meth and heroin addict. I was broken and homeless. I am none of these things now. Now I work to help those who come from places I came from.
I agree with much of your assessment. It breaks my heart to see.
I thank God for the consequences that drove me to seek help in the middle of my hell. Sometimes, life moves at the speed of pain.
"Balance of probability, dear brother," said Mycroft to Sherlock. We form generalizations for valid and sound reasons.
"Broken windows" has been taught to police cadets for more than 30 years.
Far better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6.
I read this before I headed out for my evening dog walk, and I just re-read it, in an effort to gather my thoughts about it. I don’t usually walk the dog after dark but life got in the way and I came home late. We did not take our usual evening route, but that’s only because I dislike using streets with no sidewalks after dark. We did about a mile and half, sometimes on sidewalks with no street lights. We passed or met several other walkers, both white and black, on the way. At no time did I have any apprehension of impeding problems. I felt safe.
I wish I knew *why* my experience of life is so different than yours — why I am unafraid to walk the streets of my town after dark. Why there is no violent crime and no open conflict here. I wish there was a mathematical formula: you need to reduce X by 15% and multiply Y by Z^2. But I don’t think it works like that. There’s plenty of petty property crime here: if you leave a bicycle or an expensive tool in the front yard, you’re not entitled to be surprised if it’s gone the next morning. Construction sites have copper lifted all the time. But occupied houses don’t get broken into; there’s no car theft and a carjacking would be a 50-year event; there hasn’t been a rape, a battery, or an arson in the ten years I’ve lived here. There *was* one homicide: originally charged as murder, it was eventually settled as involuntary manslaughter. It was a dispute between two men — known to each other — over a woman, that got out of hand. It was the first time it had happened here in thirty years. And most relevant to your tale: there is no panhandling, no visible homeless presence, and no open drug use (other than the wafting aroma of weed, which is perfectly legal here). Amazon packages don’t get lifted from front porches!
Maybe it’s because we are both relatively small (town population ~ 4000) *and* the county seat (which means the courthouse, the county jail, and the sheriff’s office are here, in addition to our town police force)? That doesn’t seem like a sufficient reason.
It's exactly the progression that unfolded in the SF bay area and the Portland area, both of which I was unfortunate enough to be present to see. There's a variety of "compassion" that is neither libertarian nor liberal, but masquerades as both--it's a rent-seeking racket by organizations that vend and distribute "aid" to such populations in the form of the needles, the narcan, the "social services," etc. Last I checked (ten or so years ago) the city of SF was spending hundreds of millions per year on such "aid" that incentivized all the worst aspects of the situations.
These things don't happen by accident. There's a LOT of money being sponged off the taxpayers to make things this bad, and a LOT of corruption and kickbacks for city leaders that keep the industry happening and growing and making such places a magnet for these problems. It's intentional, and very profitable. And it's horrific for everyone except the people getting rich off it.
Someone, I don't remember who now, recently posted a link to Tom Wolfe's masterful essay on SF, "Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers." I had read it probably 35 years ago, when it would have already been a generation old. And yet it perfectly describes and anticipates the current situation, in which the federal government provides incentives and means for bad actors to assail local governments into impotent submission.
A fantastic essay. SF has been on this path a LONG time, starting all the way back with Jim Jones, who built the city's homelessness-industrial complex before he left for Guyana in order to get out of town ahead of scrutiny over corruption, kickbacks, and other shady shit. SF power brokers drank the proverbial kool-aid long before Jonestown residents were forced, at gunpoint, to drink the poisoned Flavor-Aid in their act of Marxist revolutionary suicide.
Here is a link to a free read (and as usual, you get what you pay for...it's horribly formatted and difficult to process).
https://teageegeepea.tripod.com/maumau.html
I tend to have Libertarian instincts, but my focus is natural rights. On your point at the beginning of your essay, I don't think about slopes, but rather lines. What bothers me about proposals of the dialectical Left is that they don't seem to recognize lines, and they seem to intentionally blur those lines. That blurring of lines does lead to the slippery slope reaction because we know that when the Left dances around the reasonable to justify the unreasonable, it is very tough to trust the outcome of anything they propose. Case in point: weapomuzing child welfare services to justify their over-the-top butchery. Very real abuse cases must be addressed, but the Progressive blurring of definition of abuse to include the absurd and dangerous causes the natural distrust and extreme reaction. It's intentional and demoralizing.
For what it’s worth, I think your concern is warranted. Society is being destroyed wherever one looks.
The way I see it the West is squandering the social capital it has taken thousands of years to develop. Discrimination - the ability to distinguish slippery slopes from minor issues - is critical and your reaction to the use of the people who are paid to uphold public order to save people who are being enabled to take fatal drugs and not allowed to uphold public order is just plain sensible. Chaos is already the case. At the ATM, at the restaurant. I went to Bellows Falls High School in the fifties. Public order here in Western Australia today is just as solid as it was back in those days. And please don't be so hard on yourself - it is just in the nature of things people take the written word differently than intended sincerely or otherwise - and congratulations on your new job.
I'm just flabbergasted that I somehow left the exact opposite impression of the one I tried very hard to leave.
I just re-read the opening of the essay and I would say it wasn't clear at the beginning, AS I READ IT FOR THE FIRST TIME, where you were going with exploring the difficulties of slippery slope thinking. But it becomes perfectly clear when your wrote "But some slopes are quite slippery". Perhaps, and I mean exactly that, your counter example of extreme libertarians might have made some readers think you were going in the direction of dismissing your reactions as mistaken slippery slope thinking when you actually wanted to discuss a series of interrelated examples of a serious social decay. A really dangerous situation. You are not talking about catastrophizing or a tipping point but a mature situation that is already well out of control. Our whole Western Culture has gone through the looking glass and the Red Queen tells us daily that words mean what we want them to mean. Just like some of her Jesters want you make numbers mean what they want them to mean.
Right. But all of that involves bad faith. But when someone who reads me in good faith walks away thinking that I said the exact opposite of what I intended to say, I can only conclude that I have no business writing. Jesus Christ.
When I was a freshman at Columbia in 1960 in an introductory English class full of very bright young men, many of them brighter than me, I was the only one who got it that Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal was satirical. You know the one where he suggested the the solution to the problem of excess Irish babies was for the rich to eat them and then assured his readers that he did not have a pecuniary interest in the scheme as he had no children and his wife was past child bearing. The teacher managed to shut me up before I spilled the beans but it was a sobering experience. You are an excellent writer - noticeably better than myself - and you say you are backing off because of work commitments. That sounds sensible to me. It is a bad faith atmosphere today. I felt you were right to back off direct political commentary because of that atmosphere. Despite the fact I enjoyed participating in it - it is not good for me either. I'm off to the Buddhist monastery to meditate and wishing you healthy dose of equanimity. :-)
It is so easy for us humans to react to complicated problems in ways that turn out to be simplistic and to create more negative outcomes than solutions.
I read these and shudder along with you and all non-demoralised Americans.
Your description of the gradual progress towards inhospitable neighbourhoods paints a clear picture for me. It's incredibly sad to hear about the decline of another charming US city.
It also makes me wonder about the impact on first responders like firefighters having to prevent drug overdoses. This isn't what they signed up for. Operating outside one's chosen professional role can be demoralising and drive a different kind of burnout.
FWIW, I believe this is one of the major problems in education—taking on roles that we never should have taken on (though there are way too many teachers who WANT to take on these roles).
The situation you describe is so frustrating. Partly because it is so easy to diffuse.
Here's an example from my classroom. Every teacher I know gets fed up with student work that is unreadable. Except me. Here's why I don't have the problem:
1. I tell the students on the first day of class that if they turn in something that is sloppy, they will have to re-do it.
2. I follow through. The first week, I usually get about 3-5 kids who turn in something that is terrible. I have a bright red stamp that says: "This looks like garbage. Re-do." I stamp the assignment, and then the students miss recess or PE to re-do the assignment.
3. All it takes is 1-2 times for the students to see that I am serious about this, and nobody turns in sloppy junk ever again.
And notice that this policy isn't mean. Sure, it may feel mean to the guilty kids at first. I always get a couple break-downs over this that first week of school. But once that is over, the kids see that I'm actually helping them improve (one of the biggest sources of mistakes in math, for example, is sloppy work that makes simple operations impossible because the kids can't read their own writing). They are better off with the high expectations, and it doesn't take long for them to realize it. It doesn't take long for some of the sloppiest kids to feel excited that, for the first time in their lives, they have work that they can be proud of.
This is what COULD happen regarding the slippery slope you see in Vermont. But from how you describe your communities, far too many people seem caught up in the "I want to be compassionate" mantra to fix the problem. Even though there is nothing compassionate at all in enabling, encouraging, and cheering on dysfunction.
And I certainly understand why you reacted as you did. It's pretty easy to imagine that if you call the police about this man, you'd find yourself the subject of a story on the news the next day.
Yep. Having seen what happens to white women who call the police who are legitimately being threatened by black men ("I'm going to do what I'm going to do and you're not going to like it....") I would not do so until I needed medical attention as a consequence of whatever had just occurred. Sad but true.