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November 29, 2021

American cities are reverting to primitive, self-destructive behavior

By Andrea Widburg

American cities on the Democrats' watch are drifting away from civilization.  The most obvious problem is the rise in crime — everything from murders to mass retail theft.  Just open any Chicago or New York newspaper to see what I mean.  But the decline in civilization happens in smaller ways, too, as a story out of San Francisco perfectly illustrates.

I grew up near San Francisco's West Portal neighborhood.  My first elementary school, before busing took me out of one white, middle-class elementary school within walking distance of my home and sent me to another white, middle-class elementary school that was not, was West Portal Elementary.  According to my copy of San Francisco's West Portal Neighborhoods, my school was built in 1926, at around the same time the entire neighborhood was developed.

The book's back cover nicely describes the neighborhood I knew:

When you're in West Portal and the adjacent Forest Hill and St. Francis Wood, it's hard to believe you're still in San Francisco. These quiet and picturesque neighborhoods are decidedly non-urban, yet they are connected by a streetcar tunnel that leads under Twin Peaks to the bustling downtown area, two miles through the city's mountainous core. In fact, West Portal is named for the western end of this tunnel, which opened in 1917 to bring residents from the city center to what were new garden suburbs. Originally West Portal was sandy and scruffy, while Forest Hill and St. Francis Wood were heavily forested. The neighborhoods grew rapidly in the 1920s, and today West Portal is a popular shopping and entertainment district, while St. Francis Wood and Forest Hill boast some of the city's finest architecture and landscaping.

Even when we were very little, my friends and I could safely walk around the busy West Portal shopping street, just down the hill from our school.  Clutching quarters in our hands, we'd buy candy or ice cream.  The shopkeepers knew us, and we'd often run into our parents' friends, who knew us, too. It was very much a family neighborhood.

Even when I was last there, perhaps seven or eight years ago, while many of the stores I remembered were gone, it was still a busy friendly street, without chain stores sullying it.  The library, where I spent endless hours as a child and young adult, was unchanged, which was a comfort.

Those memories explain why I found so horrifying a video shot at an intersection just one block east of the northeastern end of West Portal.  That intersection was down the hill from my school, and my best friend in third and fourth grades lived a block away from there.  Again, we're talking about a neighborhood that spent 90 years being solidly middle-class and friendly.

What the video showed was a vast crowd around the intersection watching a car spin donuts, something that is also called a "sideshow":

Others who knew the neighborhood were equally horrified:

Judging by the tweets on the subject, it was some time before the police finally stopped this illegal, dangerous, and just plain ugly activity:

When the donut spinning was done, this is what the intersection looked like:

It turns out that another sideshow took place at the same time in the Sunset District, only 20 blocks from where I grew up.  And just a week ago, in Oakland, there was a massive sideshow, complete with gunfire.

I blame what's happening entirely on the left.  Beginning in 2013, with George Zimmerman's self-defense shooting against Trayvon Martin, leftists have been steadily chipping away at the infrastructure that supports law-abiding middle-class Americans.  The war on police blossomed into Defund the Police, which segued seamlessly into no bail, which resulted in six people dying in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and a sideshow in what was once the quietest and safest middle-class neighborhood in San Francisco.

Many are describing what's happening in America in a top-down revolution — that is, the political class, the billionaires, and the affluent professional class, having been marinated in Marxism in college, are imposing a Cloward-Piven strategy on America.  To implement the socialist revolution that these rich people desire and assume they'll survive, they're systematically destroying all the institutional brakes that keep a society safe and functioning.

Currently, the affluent leftists are insulated from the chaos they're creating.  The people harmed are the ordinary folks who just want to live peaceful lives in a stable, affluent country.  The big question is whether ordinary folks will have time between now and 2022, and again between now and 2024, to break through the bought-and-paid-for election fraud that puts these despicable people in power at every level of federal and state government.  Only in that way can we save America from the political and street sideshows that are killing it.

Image: A sideshow-destroyed intersection in West Portal by Kai Sparnas.

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