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It's long been a longstanding trope that old folks complain about the general ignorance and laziness of the younger generation. These days, however, there's a disturbing mount of proof of this thesis - though in large part, it isn't their fault.
Recently, we explored the deliberate destruction of our education system and its horrendous effects on our national culture and politics, by showing how Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' (D, NY) immensely popular Green New Deal is based on unrealistic notions she was taught in our fraud-based public schools. AOC herself is not stupid, far from it - it's just that so much of what she's been taught simply isn't so, or is so fundamentally divorced from reality as to be otherworldly. Yet she accurately and fairly represents the desires, knowledge, and lack thereof of those who elected her.
The decline in our education system is truly remarkable. Historynet asserts that
As recently as 20 years ago, the United States was ranked No.1 in high school and college education. ...
In 2009, the United States was ranked 18th out of 36 industrialized nations.
These rankings are based on standard tests which are administered to large samples of students in nations all across the world. Part of the reason for our relative decline is that other nations revamped their school systems along with their factories as they recovered from WW II. We also revamped ours throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but while other nations emphasized academic achievement, ours zeroed in on self-esteem, political correctness, social promotion, and "No Child Left Behind" - with the results we see around us every day.
On top of that, until they introduced market-based reforms in the 1980s, the Chinese communist government had kept the billion-plus Chinese people isolated from the world economy. Along with India liberalizing their restrictive trade policies in the 1990s at about the same time the Chinese economic reforms began to boost their economy, today's young Americans face more than two billion more competitors than the previous generation.
Our trillion-dollar levels of student debt wouldn't be much of a problem if new college graduates were able to earn substantial sums of money, but they aren't. Although the Trump economy has boomed to the point that there are more job openings than applicants, all too many of the jobs require skills which even most college graduates lack.
It used to be possible for a high-school dropout to go directly to work in a factory and learn the job over time. That no longer works. Although American manufacturing generates more and more economic value, there are fewer and fewer jobs in manufacturing because so much of the work is done by machines which are tended by a few highly-skilled workers.
We've pointed out that there are no more manufacturing jobs that can be learned from scratch while working, so to get even that very first job other than fast food, kids need skills our schools don't teach.
Being woke means that you criticize high status people - or at least, people who are members of groups which have historically been assumed to have high status, whether or not that particular individual actually does. Our Social Justice Warriors compete with each other to illustrate their wokeness by criticizing anyone who accomplishes anything of value. Wokeness doesn't value competence, criticizing anyone who values competent people over the incompetent as being guilty of "abelism" or relying on "privilege."
The problem with this approach to societal functioning is that a great deal of competence is needed to maintain our high-tech civilization - most especially in heavily urban places such as New York or Los Angeles, which just so happen to also be the places where wokeness is most endemic.
Densely-populated cities have always drawn people because of the range of activities and skills that can be found in them. This generally leads to innovation which makes society as a whole richer.
However, as we've explained, for a city to function, it's essential to bring in vast quantities of fresh water and get rid of a somewhat larger amount of defiled water. If you don't have enough clean drinking water or don't get rid of sewage, your city can't grow. In the late 17th century, London needed 6,000 incoming migrants per year to replace all the people who'd died.
By the early 1900's, however, most American cities had well-functioning water and sewer systems and urban populations could really take off.
Wokeness has so devalued competence that our progressive-ruled cities can no longer maintain the infrastructure their ancestors built. When the city of Flint, Michigan was found to have lead in the water, the resulting hullabaloo could be heard the length and breadth of the fruited plain. Yet to this day, repairs are not complete. A search for Republicans to blame found nobody closer to the problem than the governor of the entire state. Since when is a state governor responsible for a city water system?
Flint isn't the only progressive-ruled city which can't keep the lead out. The levels of lead in Newark, New Jersey’s drinking water are some of the highest recently recorded by a large water system in the United States. The New York City Housing Authority, known as NYCHA, houses at least 1,160 lead-affected children as opposed to 300-600 in the city of Flint.
Both these incidents are due entirely to laziness and incompetence. The chemicals needed to keep lead from leaching into water have been known for a century but the Flint and Newark water system managers ignored this knowledge. NYCHA officials knew about their lead problem, but falsified inspection records to cover it up instead of fixing the problems. None of the unionized, Democrat city employees who falsified records or ignored basic chemistry got into trouble.
The fruits of incompetence are there for all to see, but nobody wants to discuss the root cause of diminished respect for competence and effectiveness.
The situation in Los Angeles isn't as dire, at least not yet. The water department has been able to keep the sewers working, but for sewers to be effective in disposing of waste, people have to use toilets. In Los Angeles, it's become common for homeless people to defecate and urinate in the streets.
The LA Times reports:
Typhus, in particular, is spread by fleas that live on rats and then bite humans, something that could become more common as more people live on the streets.
Thirteen people in the state were diagnosed with typhus in 2008, compared with 167 last year. More than 95% of the people falling sick in California are in Los Angeles and Orange counties, according to state health data.
The Daily Wire warns that the bubonic plague may make a comeback due to the generally unsanitary conditions in the city:
"We have a complete breakdown of the basic needs of civilization in Los Angeles right now," [Dr.] Pinsky told Fox New host Laura Ingraham. "We have the three prongs of airborne disease, tuberculosis is exploding, rodent-borne. We are one of the only cities in the country that doesn't have a rodent control program, and sanitation has broken down."
Pinsky said bubonic plague - also known as the "Black Death," a pandemic that killed off millions in the 14th century - is "likely" already present in Los Angeles. The plague is spread by infected fleas and exposure to bodily fluids from a dead plague-infected animal, with the bacteria entering through the skin and traveling to lymph nodes.
Competence in managing the water infrastructure is of no avail unless people use toilers, but wokeness affirms that diversity is the greatest possible public good. Does this mean that public defecation customs among the homeless, illiterate illegal immigrants, and the mentally ill are as valid as our longstanding American custom of using toilets? Can't get a lot more diverse than that....
The LA Times has been covering the California homeless situation:
After a modest but encouraging decrease last year in the number of homeless people in Los Angeles County, it is extraordinarily frustrating that the progress has now been reversed, with homelessness climbing a grim 12% this year in the county and an even more alarming 16% in the city of Los Angeles. That means 58,936 people in the county were living on sidewalks, in cars and vans, in shelters or in parks when the 2019 count was carried out over three nights in January. The number of homeless people in both the city and the county is now higher than it was in 2017.
How can that be? Over the last decade, parts of Los Angeles have become a dystopian landscape of tent encampments, populated by the regions most destitute, afflicted and addicted people, along with those who are merely down on their luck. But since the passage of Measure HHH in 2016 and Measure H in 2017, the city and county have been spending billions of dollars to create new homeless housing and to provide services for those who need them. So why are the numbers still going up? Is the money being misspent? Are our policies faulty? Are we addressing the right problems?
How can it be that Angelenos voted in November 2016 to create a $1.2-billion fund to finance as many as 10,000 units of housing for chronically homeless people in the city of L.A., yet not one unit of housing has come online? [emphasis added]
Consider the $1.2 billion fund to create 10,000 housing units. That's $122,000 per unit. It sounds like a plenty of money, but 10,000 units would house fewer than 1/5 of the current homeless population. Does the city plan to come up with $5 billion more? And that calculation assumes that something useful had actually been done with the money, which it wasn't.
The second measure passed
in
2017, but not one unit of housing has been built. California has
some
of the most restrictive environmental regulations and building codes
in the world. It may not be possible for California to house an
increasing non-millionaire population at all. After all,
legalization has brought
so much costly regulation to formerly illegal marijuana growers that
many of the smaller growers are going out of business.
The Times summarized the problem, "too many [city] council members have been slow to find sites or reluctant to proceed in the face of NIMBY opposition." In this case, our sympathies lie with the NIMBYs - who would want a homeless housing unit nearby full of carriers of typhus or bubonic plague? Los Angeles isn't particularly small and has vast swaths of light-industrial parks where nobody currently lives. There aren't any NIMBYs to object to homeless housing being dropped there - but stashing filthy, stinking, addicted bums far from voters' nostrils and eyes where they can be ignored and forgotten would be un-woke.
San Fransisco sanitation isn't much better. The San Francisco Chronicle calls the situation "A civic disgrace":
That a city can spend $241 million a year on programs and still confront such human misery suggests those dollars are not being spent with anything close to optimal effectiveness. Eight city departments and 76 private and nonprofit organizations draw from those funds in 400 contracts, yet the degree of accountability is highly suspect. There is no system in place to rigorously determine which of those endeavors might be duplicative or less effective. ...
San Francisco has an entrenched Homeless Industrial Complex that is as difficult to track and control as it is to count people living on the streets. [emphasis added]
Have you ever heard of a publicly-funded entity actually solving a problem? No money in that...
The Homeless Industrial Complex does a magnificent job of spending money without solving the problem.
Some 1,500 chronically homeless people cost the city about $80,000 a year each; the figure rises to $150,000 for the 338 considered the most needy in the city’s public-health database.
The Chronicle bemoans lack of accountability, but all government actors strive to escape accountability. Shining light into dark places is the Chronicle's job! Why haven't they enumerated these 76 organizations and their 800 contracts? Isn't that what investigative journalists are supposed to do? Why haven't they done it?
The Times and the Chronicle ask appropriate questions, but don't answer them because answers would necessarily point fingers at Democrats - that's all there are in power in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and largely in California as a whole. Woke Democrats can do no wrong, of course, so assigning blame would be non-woke.
To sum up: we're seeing that our big blue cities can't house people safely, or even keep poop off the streets. If the bubonic plague breaks out in LA, there will be many deaths. No doubt a large number of them would be of the poopers themselves, which might go a certain distance to solving the problem; but no disease ever confines itself to its initial source.
Are we so far gone that we have no choice but to allow a medieval plague to wreak havoc in what once were modern Western cities, and which still have apparently billions of dollars available for the public good?
Woke-driven incompetence and lack of accountability leads to illness, epidemics, and death. California, prepare yourself for an invasion of the woking dead!