New York City is a bastion of left-wing politics.  The city's soft-on-crime approach combined with a state-implemented no bail policy for certain arrests has led to the release of people arrested who then keep committing crimes over and over again.  This release policy has led to an increase in New York City crime to the point where many citizens will not take a walk outside their homes after dark.  Subway ridership in New York City is down about one third since before the pandemic.  Obviously, the decline is not only because people are afraid of catching COVID in the subway, but also because of the rise in mentally disabled and aggressive persons, the low presence of police on the trains, and the high number of random subway attacks (now higher than when the ridership was one third greater). 

Before Bill de Blasio and his successor, another low-I.Q. individual, Eric Adams, came into the mayor's office, Mayor Rudy Giuliani had instituted a "broken windows" policy whereby relatively minor crimes like subway turnstile jumping were challenged.  Using these small infractions as a legitimate reason for stopping people, searching them, and checking their backgrounds led to the discovery of many perps who had outstanding warrants against them, people who had skipped bail or court appearances, and people who did not have stable addresses and who thereby had evaded the justice system.

 Then Michael Bloomberg, following Giuliani's lead, continued with an aggressive stop-and-frisk policing policy.  Any groups of people loitering were aggressively searched for weapons by the police, and so many weapons were confiscated that the NYC crime rates declined dramatically.  You can't threaten, maim, or kill people easily if you have been divested of your illegal weapons.

New York City is also experiencing skyrocketing rents; gentrification of some of the worst neighborhoods, which is further displacing the poor; unparalleled congestion on streets and roads; transsexual crossdressers as students in schools; and dilution of educational standards to a degree that would not have been imagined, let alone accepted twenty-five years ago, or even in the 1980s, when whitey was being blamed for low academic achievement in black neighborhoods.  Now the students all simply receive higher grades for the same poor level of work, and, voilà: the problem of low achievement is solved.  Right?

Despite so many decades of racial rhetoric and the "caring" (sic) liberal/leftist program, only the proactive policing policies of the Giuliani and Bloomberg governance made a noticeable difference in the quality of life of all citizens in the city.  One might add that the subway cars covered in graffiti as though they had been designed by a maniacal tattoo artist were finally cleaned up and replaced by Richard Ravitch and David Gunn, who took charge of the Metropolitan Transit Authority in the late 1980s.  Leadership makes a difference.

Now, in this election cycle, we see New York City declining by moving even farther away from the practical real-world leadership that was shown in the 1990s and early 2000s.  Two of the four items asking for a yes or no vote from the electorate revert back to the glittering generalities that are the hallmarks of race-baiting and all forms of demagoguery.  As soon as overgeneralized moral pap and platitudes start to flood in, we can be sure that real-time, real-world solutions are being pushed aside and wicked dissembling is moving to center stage.  Why?  Answer: To further a political agenda for some individuals who are seeking personal power, fame, and wealth for themselves.

One of the four items on the ballot calls for a new Preamble to the New York City Charter.  The new Preamble begins by stating nine goals.  The ninth goal is the desire to provide to all citizens of the city "humane, empathetic, and respectful treatment."  This writer taught in the NYC public schools for twenty years, and during that entire time, except for one teacher who expressed some hateful views in the teachers' lounge, I never observed any students of any nationality or ethnicity being treated disrespectfully or with hostility by any school employee.

One student from a Middle Eastern Arab country was always walking around the classrooms, talking to himself, walking out of the room and back in, and there were meetings with the boy, his grandfather, and school personnel about his erratic behavior.  The boy had been sent to live with his grandparents along with two other siblings when he was eight years old because of civil unrest in his home country.  He had not seen his parents in person since he was eight years old.  Nobody looked down at him because he was Muslim or deeply disturbed.  This writer had to frequently change his seat, and finally, he was seated next to a young Russian female student who was not dismissive of him, but seemed to know just how to concentrate on the class lessons, give him a little attention, and at the right time ignore his obsessive ways.

This respect for human dignity is alive and well in the hearts of New York City Americans without a Preamble laying some guilt trip on the public or the institutional leaders of the city.

The Preamble goes on to provide an extensive list — a list that seems to affirm all the human failures of America toward others, and by default of New Yorkers insofar as they belong to this nefarious gathering known as the USA.  The Preamble presents a long paragraph replete with a leftist bias and a false summary of U.S. and New York City that make us truly citizens of a wholly repugnant society that must establish a new historical direction.  The classic leftist bias, exaggeration, lies, and historical distortions are reiterated and summarized using all the well known buzzwords such as colonialism, discrimination, atrocities, systemic injustices, harms, mass incarcerations, inequity (not inequality), and many others to portray one of the most repugnant societies ever known to humankind, which thread of horrors must be purposely offset by New Yorkers.

Another item up for a vote in this election is the creation of a Commission on Racial Equity.  There is no real specificity about what plans this commission would come up with for the city, but since lack of equity is part of the summarized false narrative of NYC and the United States in the new Preamble, the commission will try to fight the overwhelming legacy of evil behavior that has brought us to this supposedly horrible point, where all the goodness of society is submerged in a sea of exploitation and hate.

It is, of course, imperative that the citizens of New York City vote down these measures.  We need leaders who can solve real problems with real-world practical and ethical solutions.  We need to turn away from this horrible leftist name-calling and finger-pointing and a misreading and miswriting of history to fit with some pre-conceived ideas of who we Americans and Westerners are and are not.  Love of neighbor and love of God are needed, and surely, the left has neither.

Image via Picryl.