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Left work late the other night to find a druggie going through in my car in the parking lot. First time that's happened, but should have expected it from seeing them stagger around after all the shops are closed down.
I'm assuming it's the fentanyl stumble, because sometimes you see them standing in weird positions staring at nothing, but maybe someone more versed in modern druglore can correct me.
The level of crime here is still low, but the jump from "literally absent" to "a general background level" has ruined the high trust that made this community great.
There are no more open cash boxes at vegetable stands (the last one got smash-and-grabbed a month ago). A friend had all his plumbing gear stolen out of his truck (you can't even fence that stuff locally!). I never used to carry a gun here, but started recently. I never used to lock my door while I was out, but started after my neighbor's place got ransacked. When I was a kid I used to leave the keys in my truck like everyone else, in case a friend wanted to borrow it.
All the petty crime here is carried out by dysfunctional scum who were attracted by the scraps thrown to them by do-gooders. Some of them were deliberately recruited in "rehabilitation schemes" and dumped on us when they inevitably failed. Those responsible quickly moved on to providing "safe drug use supplies" for their former charges at the local community center. All taxpayer-funded, of course.
In fact, I know all the people responsible for importing this biowaste to our community, and they all live in newly-built mansions down long driveways with automatic gates and security cameras.
Meanwhile I have a lot of my net worth in equipment that basically can't be secured right off a main road, relying on the fact that until now nobody just wandered in to steal your stuff.
It might seem stupid to complain about when we still have basically no murders, but it enrages me that we lost something precious, and it was deliberately inflicted on us by smug pricks who will never face any consequences for it. They won't even gain anything from having done it to us, other than the joy of seeing us suffer while they remain comfortably immune.
Not sure where I'm going with this, but like Goodguy's personal story the other week, it's a general reflection on the inadequacy of crime statistics to capture its impact on communities.
And a growing appreciation for the importance of meting out consequences in an equitable fashion.
I lost my beloved younger brother a few years ago to drug addiction. He was 35. He struggled for years (and I mean really struggled) to stop using heroin, with some periods of success. When he was using drugs, he would lie and steal. But even during those times, he was always a very generous person when he could be. He was very sensitive (in some ways, I think this was actually a burden for him), and he made friends easily. He was funny and smart (which was perhaps another burden). He had very serious depression and anxiety his entire life. I'm sure my parents will never recover from the loss.
My point here is that many of the drug addicts you despise are actually struggling desperately. Most have had difficult lives. Some have loved ones that care deeply about them and want to see them get healthy. Others don't have anyone in the world who cares about them, either because they never had a family, or because their families died, or because they alienated them through their behaviors.
There are important conversations to be had about whether drug addiction is more of a choice or more of a disease. And there are conversations to be had about the balance between community interests and the interests of those with substance abuse disorders, and how community burdens should be fairly distributed. And there are conversations about which policies or actions actually help individuals with substance abuse disorders, versus which policies are counter-productive because they just enable or encourage these disorders.
But calling someone "dysfunctional scum" or "druggie" or "biowaste" isn't the way to start these conversations. That's the kind of language people use to dehumanize others. I think you should be ashamed of yourself.
Many of these people are poor unfortunates.
But every society in history has figured out that harsh views about people who are merely unfortunate is a necessity of having a functional society. You can have the public and public institutions be unfair to people- indeed, it's impossible for them to be perfectly fair- they just need to work. And unfortunately being nice to drug addicts doesn't work.
Yes, some people fuck their lives up beyond redemption in this life and it's deeply unfair to them that their efforts to reform are for naught. I'm not saying it isn't. But other people don't need to be made to suffer because of it. Most heroine addicts never really get clean, try as they might, and when they get a batch with fentanyl in it and OD many other people breathe a sigh of relief and that's not because they're monsters. It's because that heroine addict, even a well intentioned heroine addict who really struggles to get clean, is creating negative externalities for everyone else, all the time. Asking us to deal with it is even more unfair; after all, we stable functional people didn't recommend him to get into drugs, and probably told him not to.
But the soul is still oracular, amid the market's din/List the ominous stern whisper, from the Delphic cave within/They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.
"It’s not a ‘compromise with sin’, per se, just discarding certain people who happen to be a net loss to us."
"Exactly what do you think a compromise with sin is?"
It's sin all around. It's a sin of omission to allow these people to prey on others and generally shit up the place (often literally). And it's a sin of commission to use the power of government to protect those people from their victims.
Enshittification of public spaces has massive knock on consequences regarding social cohesion that are unquantifiable by econometrics. Diminished prosocial trust in neighbours to look after ones property and kin willingly, much less competently, results in private sector security and care solutions that take away theoretically optimal agglomerated public services. Property value disparities due to unspecified 'concerns' (crime. its crime) about neighbourhood populations cause inefficient capital utilization and rectification measures, or outright capital destruction. Worst of all, faith in public institutions faltering causes underinvestment and thus under capability of theoretically optimal outcomes.
Good outcomes flow from good societies. You can't build a utopia and bring in street trash and expect them to magically shape up. There are no CCS chargers in shitty neighbourhoods because tweakers steal the copper, and there are no grocery stores in food deserts because shitheads keep stealing stuff.
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