A group of men, all wearing masks, used bats and wooden planks to pound at windows at Zumiez, a skateboarding apparel store at Broadway near E. 13th St. in the East Village. (Kerry Burke/New York Daily News)
Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness: Cultural Suicide Is Painless
The story of all Dark Ages is that when civilizations finally prefer suicide, they do it easily, and the remnants flock to the countryside to preserve what they can—allowing the cities go on with their ritual self-destruction.
In February, New York was the world’s most dynamic metropolis. By August, the city was more like the ruins of Ephesus. It is not all that hard to blow up a culture. You can do it in a summer if you haven’t much worry about others.
When you loot and burn a Target in an hour, it takes months to realize there are no more neighborhood Target-stocked groceries, toilet paper, and Advil to buy this winter.
You can in a night assault the police, spit at them, hope to infect them with the coronavirus, and even burn them alive. But when you call 911 in a few weeks after your car is vandalized, your wallet is stolen, and your spouse is violent, and no one comes, only then do you sense that you earlier were voting for a pre-civilized wilderness.
You can burn down a Burger King in half an hour. But it will take years to find anyone at Burger King, Inc., who would ever be dumb enough to rebuild atop the charred ruins—to prepare for the next round of arson in 2021 or 2023.
Today’s looter carrying off sneakers and smartphones in 10 years will be tomorrow’s urban activist, understandably but in vain demanding stores return to a charred no man’s land, to do their fair share, and to help restore the downtown, neighborhood, inner-city, or the “community.”
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WNU Editor: My friends who live and/or work in New York City are horrified with what has happened in the past 6 months. It is now unrecognizable to what New York City was 6 months ago, and there is a growing acceptance that times are going to get worse. As for the other cities whose stores and commercial centers have been destroyed by BLM and Antifa rioters, you just know that they are not going to recover in the coming years. For those who want to know about Ephesus (I did not know when I read the title), a good description of the city's history is here .... Ephesus (Wikipedia).
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