Progressivism Devouring The Childen

The figures are in for Hartford. 30 murders this year. An internal police report finds that the city has 138 gangs, with over 4000 members. Last year's high school graduation rate was 29%.

The city spends between $11000 and $17000 per year, per student, (depending upon the source of the data) with 80% of the total provided by the State of Connecticut. Teacher's unions are opposed to school vouchers, maybe because they aren't bullet proof and they're hard to read with bloodstains.

August, 2008: Following the city's West Indian Festival, in separate incidents, seven youngsters were shot. Among them, a 21-year old was killed, a 7-year old was shot in the head, and a toddler was shot in the leg. The city tried to enact a curfew but the ACLU intervened.

Beside the ACLU, the gargoyles on the ethical rubble of Hartford - and New Haven and Bridgeport, are the Democrats in the General Assembly and a liberal Republican governor. This is a deep blue state, as you might guess.

This time, after the West Indian Festival, they didn't even dispense the usual load of liberal crap; they were silent, the governor went on doing her PSA's for safer swimming pools, child safety seats, and the travail of 911 operators. The greasy Attorney General continued to sniff out the foul deeds of telephone marketers. The Democrat mayor was preoccupied with ethics charges.

Urban renewal, commencing in the early 1950's and rising every five years or so, zombie-like, renovated empty buildings, laid herringbone brick sidewalks; cleaned up the projects. Spotless Brutalist concrete in the jungles of despair is always the progressive solution to these problems. In the beginning, they destroyed the old ethnic neighborhoods, rustled up the inhabitants and herded them to the soul-desolating brick and sheetrock iron maidens of subsidized housing, the mocking monuments to what was destroyed.

Now the third generation of these bereft pawns of progressivism find relief in drugs and violence, in degenerate music, or prestige in an Acura with wheels like razor blades. There's no refuge from their practical plight, or in the tinsel of materialism and fraudulent promise that more, and even more, "education" or after-school programs will bring rational order from moral chaos.

Nothing will, nothing can, change without a life free of the governing madness of the reformer, freedom from a political class trying to minister to the contradictory demands of the spirit, mind and the body. Whenever, some time-serving monster in a legislative chamber exerts himself to make your life better, run away screaming, or leap to his throat. Do it early, because a generation down to road, it will be too late.

* The painting is Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son"