Detroit Death City – Monument to the Left

Indignity of indignities! – just when Motor City denizens assumed their situation couldn’t worsen: not only has Detroit become the object lesson for how an American city dies; it seems their hometown is becoming a popular end point for cast-off bodies.

The Associated Press reports, “Abandoned and neglected parts of the city are quickly becoming dumping grounds for the dead — at least a dozen bodies in 12 months’ time … Seven of the victims are believed to have been slain outside Detroit.”

Upon hearing this news, my immediate impression was: Yikes! How horrible; and how perfectly, ghoulishly apt a metaphor for modern Liberalism’s legacy.

For more than a generation, you see, Democrats have maintained an iron grip — a death grip — on Michigan’s most celebrated metropolis. Thus, its current state of moldering disrepair and dystopia.

Once our nation’s automotive Mecca, formerly boasting the fifth largest population and highest median income of a major municipality, Detroit’s residency has since collapsed, currently half its 1950 tally. That median income ranking by 2011? Plummeting to sixty-sixth.

The city’s 2010 13.4% unemployment rate was an incapacitating 40% higher than the then-national average. One-third of Detroiters live in poverty. Half its housing stock — 30,000-plus units! — gape forlornly, vacant. Its high school students register the lowest graduation rate in the country.

The Bay Area Center for Voting Research has pegged Detroit “the most liberal major city” (Leftist candidates there consistently sow up 94% of the vote). And not coincidentally, 247WallSt.com nominated it for another, more conspicuously distasteful distinction: one of “America’s Ten Dead Cities”.

Safe to say, the Democrat darlings who’ve helmed Motown, nearly unimpeded, since mid-last century didn’t expect things to go this way. RealClearPolitics‘ Thomas Bray has explained, ““Detroit … was going to be the ‘Model City’ of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the shining example of what the ‘fairness’ of the welfare state can produce.”

Concludes American Spectator‘s Peter Ferrara, “[O]ver half a century of uniform governance by liberal/left politicians has led to the city now literally starting to disappear beneath their feet.”

Lefties’ shining city on a hill? More a slouching, blighted slum, emblem of what predictably happens when Progressivism’s luminous boasts cross paths with unsparing reality.

And now Detroit is being reduced to a geographical depository for unclaimed corpses.

The nostrums of morally ambivalent, statist Liberalism thrive on death, produce death and attract its hallmarks.

Doubt me? Where better to start than libertine Leftism’s Big, Scarlet A: the treasured, baby-killing abortion industry. Pompously propagandizing with the glittering euphemism “choice”, Progressives have sacrificed landfills of tiny human beings to their obsession with consequence-free sexual anarchy. It’s actual, physical death served up by way of the mainstream Left; in the multiplied millions.

Liberalism’s weird aversion toward proliferating life shows up in other kinds of disquieting ways. It’s not at Tea Party, pro-life, or C-PAC confabs, after all, that one finds glowering legions of man-hating feminists. One anti-male wit has quipped, “Women need men like a fish needs a bicycle” — conveniently leaving out that bit about sperm’s role in propagating the race. There’s no escaping: even should a woman settles on the turkey baster or invitro route, those irksome XY types retain an essential contribution to species survival. Throngs of Leftist ladies and quisling men would just as soon close their eyes – and in the process ours — to that fact.

It’s not traditional conservatives, moreover, that have gone all gaa-gaa over homosexual “marriage”, sexual couplings which, definitionally, cannot generate offspring. As a twice-adoptive parent, I can testify to adoption’s immeasurable blessing as child-rearing alternative. But for “same-sex” couples that’s the only choice. Or a dog or cat. (c.f., Biology 101.)

What sinisterly insistent message lurks behind the current environmental movement, nearly always welcomed in Democrat precincts? People: yucky! Trees and Critters: Nifty! Fewer humans, smaller families equal a happier Gaia.

For all their manipulative gabbling about “the children”, Libs sure don’t seem terribly fond of the flesh-and-blood article.

The welfare state clapped together by Leftism’s refractory ideology has smuggled another kind of death into Western Civilization. Peddling “victimhood”, racial resentments and “root cause” excuse-making for anti-social behavior, Liberals have marooned multitudes in poverty, crime, hopelessness – particularly in our inner-cities.

Fathers? Dispensable nowadays; Uncle Sam has become bread-winner for families unnumbered. Diligent work habits? Why bother? Government-generated income, room, board, even perqs like cable TV and cell phones are guaranteed — courtesy of American tax-payers. Any kind of authentic job is mortifyingly optional.

Under such soul-squelching conditions, even people who manage to keep breathing undergo a kind of death: human dignity dies; creativity expires; dreams and healthy ambition, too. Personal responsibility crumbles – officious bureaucrats become our keepers. Men and women, created in the image of God to live purposeful lives, are reduced to infantilized wards of the state.

Democrats’ shoulder-shrugging malfeasance regarding national security, additionally, courts death in its own exasperating way. From disregard of our border to inattention to our Constitutionally-mandated military, fatal atrocities result; again, sometimes literally.

It’s estimated thousands of U.S. citizens, in the past decade alone, had their lives wastefully cut short by illegal aliens: an Arizona Rancher (on his own property), a Virginia nun (run down by an inebriated Bolivian), untold casualties of gang violence; too many others to enumerate. The pertinent authorities, encouraged and empowered to manfully enforce reasonable immigration policies, might have prevented these outrages. But that would mean Progressives’ abandoning their animus toward common-sense border control. So — never mind.

The enemies’ brazenness abroad toward our jihadist-hunting troops can be traced starkly to the anti-military Left. Its unremitting trash-talking of our forces and their cause demoralizes them and sends the “weak horse” signal to rabid “holy warriors” whose consuming passion is America’s destruction.

What do all the above have in common? Well, Liberalism. And life denied, or degraded, or discouraged.

Could that (D) following the name of every Democrat official pull double-duty to signify “death”, as well? Admittedly, that’s shocking speculation — but it seems rather more appropriate when one ruminates a moment on Detroit, Michigan after half-a-century of Leftist management.