Instant Karma’s gonna get ya!
Maybe not so instant, but close enough. Two items popped up towards the end of this last week.
The first got very wide coverage. Mayor Eric Adams has — mostly — admitted the real consequences of our wide-open southern border. Here is Hizzoner speaking at a NYC town hall:
I don’t see an ending to this. This issue will destroy New York City. We’re getting 10,000 migrants a month. The city we knew, we’re about to lose.
We have to feed, clothe, house, educate their children, wash their laundry sheets, give them everything they need, health care. One time, we were just getting Venezuela. Now we’re getting Ecuador. Now we’re getting Russian speaking, coming through Mexico. Now we’re getting western Africa.
Funny how the reality wasn’t acknowledged until it came to his home. I search for similar words of understanding for the mayors and governors in Arizona, Texas, and Florida who have been dealing with this for years. (READ MORE: America’s Immigration Implosion)
Any policy can be great when you can export all its nasty consequences to someone else. NIMBY, we called in junior high social studies class in the Sixties — not in my backyard. My teacher helped us all to be aware of the moral laxness of that position.
When we don’t care to enforce our own laws, who can blame them? Should they have to care more about the laws than we do?
When it was only the Czechs who had to suffer from Nazi occupation as the result of appeasement, that policy was widely popular in Britain and France. Not so much when the panzers broke through at Sedan and the Dorniers were dropping bombs on London each night.
There is a well-known parable of two men being chased by a hungry bear. The one says, “Let’s stop and do something else. We can’t outrun a bear.”
The other one said, “I don’t have to outrun the bear. I only have to outrun you.”
But what if the bear is still hungry? There are an awful lot of people hungry for what they believe is being given away here — the massive entitlements of the quasi-socialist state. Behind the millions already come millions more — just not those who have applied to come legally, who are put off again and again.
Most immigrants are innocent enough in their pursuit of a better life. When we don’t care to enforce our own laws, who can blame them? Should they have to care more about the laws than we do? So, by virtue of our benign neglect, we won’t label them all criminals for violating laws we choose not to enforce (and that goes for all you weed smokers; no matter what the states do, there’s still federal statute. But it, too, is not enforced, and there is no push to repeal the law.) (READ MORE: Prepare for Legal Marijuana)
No doubt that the criminal and terrorist element among them is an extremely small percentage. Let’s be appropriately conservative and say 5 percent. With six million coming through during these years of Old Joe’s ostensibly benignant senility, that would make only about 30,000 of them. Not our worry if they stay in Texas, right?
Speaking about criminal elements, here’s the other item that might have got us to play the Ono Band’s groovy single again, hot off the wires from the Land o’ Lakes.
Shivanthi Sathanandan is second vice-chairperson of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in Minneapolis. In the magical summer of 2020, when insurrection was a lovely thing, and law and order was held in as much esteem as Ivermectin in the CDC, she was outspoken about getting rid of the Minneapolis Police. She wrote about this on Facebook with the moderation so typical of her political allies at that time:
We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Say it with me.
Warming to her theme, and offering sound and cogent reasoning to balance her warm enthusiasm, she posted again:
DISMANTLE
The
(The reasoning is encoded in the clapping hands, one must suppose.)
But that was then. In the old days, a mugged liberal turned into a conservative, somewhat abashedly and careful to preserve some thread of connection to their previous stance. Today, a mugged radical leftist catapults much further than that in reaction.
Ms. Sathanandan was viciously attacked in front of her own children, on her own driveway, by carjackers who beat her, broke her leg, and took her car. She deserved that no more than a Chamberlain supporter deserved to have a German bomb dropped on her house in World War II. And her reaction to it on Facebook is understandable and all too human:
Catch these young people who are running wild creating chaos across our city and HOLD THEM IN CUSTODY AND PROSECUTE THEM.
PERIOD.
Look at my face. REMEMBER ME when you are thinking about supporting letting juveniles and young people out of custody to roam our streets instead of HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS.
The ironic tone today is not an indulgence in schadenfreude. The temptation is great, but like most temptations, it must be resisted. It is just a real snapshot of human nature. We have an urge to pontificate easily and readily about all kinds of things — as long as we are free of the negative consequences of what we advocate.
The great eighteenth century rabbi known as the Baal Shem Tov used to teach about how souls got their heavenly judgement. Free of their earthly burdens, they are welcomed by the angels who ask them if they would please help them in an important job. Flattered, the souls willingly take the job. (RELATED: You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah: Netflix’s Latest Movie Again Mocks Judaism)
The souls are then each shown a life of someone they cannot recognize and are asked to render heavenly judgment on the life they see. The souls do so, as they had become habituated to offering their judgment during their lives.
The soul is then told that the life they had judged had been their own. The judgment they made was the one they then had to endure.
So it is with our political judgment, though things are messier down here on earth and the karmic payback is rarely instant, even if sure.
Let us all require of ourselves and of those whom we choose to represent us policies that we can live with. Let’s make America morally great, and live without the moral mess of outsourcing the bad consequences of our policies to any of our fellow citizens.
