You've Made Me a Monster

Callous is My Default Mechanism

I read recently where an Oregon Doctor was walking in downtown Portland with a friend just before 11 PM when she was randomly attacked. A man threw a metal water bottle that hit her in the face. He companion yelled and scared the attacker away, she called police and it took over twenty minutes for them to arrive. Portland is short-staffed police officers since they voted to “defund the police”.

I’m sorry but I have no care or concern with what happens in Portland anymore. Anyone who chooses to live in that all-Blue metropolis with it’s radical city council, and ridiculously far Left mayor, they voted for it all, they reap what they sow. My heart is numb to their pain.

After the George Floyd murder Portland allowed rioters to take over their city, burn down a police precinct, take over an entire “zone” of town, and allowed anarchy and chaos to reign. They have allowed the homeless to spread all over town.

Portland, like Austin, has always taken pride in their counter-culture vibe, their desire to be an artistic community. Liberal to the core. I wouldn’t take a position as a policeman there for a half million a year. There is no amount of money you could pay me to risk being charged by a liberal administration and sentenced to jail for any slight against a perpetrator. They’d always take the perpetrators side.

I will never visit Portland as a tourist, I’m sure I’m missing out on some great people, some great art, and some very good restaurants. But the risk of dealing with the chaos and filth they’ve allowed to fester isn’t worth it. I’m not waiting twenty minutes for police to attend to me after being attacked in their town. They can all live with it.

Your liberal policies have made me cold, and callous, and is destroying my humanity.

I recently saw a video, I believe made in a Stockton, California 7/11, where a thief has commanded a rolling trash receptacle and is just raking his arm across items sending them flailing into the trash receptacle, and floor. He is bent on stealing everything this trash receptacle will hold.

The video quality is poor but he can be heard telling the proprietors that they are going to do nothing about it. This thin, somewhat emaciated and dirty-clad thief can even be heard telling the managers that they have insurance, as if insurance is going to cover the cost of his theft. As one of the two managers approaches the man he slides a knife up and out of his back pocket, and quickly back in, as if the threat of showing the knife is enough to have them allow him to continue filling the receptacle with stolen goods before exiting.

Unfortunately for the thief one manager gets the man down on the ground pinning his arms, while another grabs a length of bamboo cane, comes out from behind the counter, and starts wailing on the thief with the cane. The thief can be heard screaming with each blow. Another man, perhaps a customer, who seems to be the man videoing the episode, can be heard in the background muttering some admonishments, in summation you get what you deserve when you decide to play like the thief.

And when I watched the video my visceral reaction was to cheer. Cheer for each time the bamboo cane struck the thief. Cheer for the proprietor to beat the man. I became enraged with a glorious fury, exulted, filled with a joyous anger, as the man screamed in pain. I am fully aware that there is no death penalty for thieving items from a convenience store. But I wanted to see the thief beaten beyond recognition. I practically stood up from my chair with joy watching this man get instant justice.

His smug attitude of allowing some insurance claim to negate his thievery, his flash of a knife in such a casually threatening way, his entire demeanor as he stole from those men, for all of that I wanted to see him beaten until he was done. I wanted to watch him suffer.

That store is the owners livelihood, it is the way the men feed their families, the way they pay to lead their lives. It is quite probable those two men have everything they’ve invested in their lives tied up in the store that this man decided to casually rob. He wasn’t casually stealing a few hundred items from them, he was stealing their lives. The opportunities for their children. Their careers and investment.

And for that there should be the death penalty. And so I cheered. I cheered his beating and found myself tensing in the chair, my arms tightening, as if I too wanted to rain down blows on the thief myself.

You did this to me, you liberals. You’ve made me a monster.

I grew up a good little Catholic boy. An altar boy, a lector at the church. I read from the Bible, I took the Ten Commandments to heart. I’ve tried to live a decent life. Sure I have failed at times. But it has been an aim, a goal in life, to try to add to the greater good of the community in which I live, to be a net positive, not a negative.

And yet the liberal states policies of lax enforcement, of no cash bail, of allowing criminals to thrive on our streets, to just destroy our cities and cause chaos and mayhem has made me callous. From rampant homelessness due to a misguided compassion, to a justice system that favors the criminal, to all manner of ridiculous liberal programs that reward sloth and makes a mockery of effort and striving, all of this has made me not only numb to the consequences but callous to your pain.

A man was beaten with a bamboo cane and I cheered. He is a human being, failing in that moment, obviously failing in life, and you’ve replaced any compassion I could have for the man with a desire to have him beaten beyond recognition.

There were multiple pictures in the Oregon article about the woman hit with the metal bottle. Her pretty face bloodied, her lip ripped open. Where I should feel pity and compassion for her plight I feel cold. I blame her for even being in that crap hole of a city anywhere near 11 PM. And being an Oregon resident and staying in that deep Blue town after those riots of 2020, she deserves anything she gets. You voted it, you live with it. A pox on you all. I have no sympathy for your plight. You can slide into becoming Detroit for all I care, it is what you are voting for, you all confuse compassion for care and concern. You allow drug addicts to continue to kill themselves daily and refuse to force them to make some attempt to live their fullest life. Absent Narcan they’d be dying a dozen a day just in Portland. Because of your own lax policies toward their use. I want people to lead their fullest and best lives, you allow them to decline in the streets.

As tents begin to line the streets of New York City, a proud “Sanctuary City”, tents full of illegal immigrants who crossed our borders illegally, and who enriched the cartels, I cheer. I pray that the compassionate New Yorkers get all the benefits of their proudly being a “Sanctuary City”. May it break them and take the entire city under.

See?

You’ve done this to me liberals. You’ve made me into a monster. I don’t want to be so callous and awful, I want my compassion and understanding back.

Your liberal lunacy is destroying more than your city, or our country, it is destroying my own moral fiber.