About 33 years ago I moved out of New York City.\u00a0 Now I was born and bred there.\u00a0 My family had lived there for four generations.\u00a0 I liked the amenities that the City possessed.\u00a0 I could take the kids to Central Park and to the American Museum of Natural History or the Metropolitan Museum of Art.\u00a0 We could go to a Yankee or Met game, go to the beach, go fishing out of Sheepshead Bay.\u00a0 It was my home.\u00a0 I liked my neighbors.\u00a0 But this was in the mid-eighties and things had gotten steadily more dangerous even in a relatively \u201csafe\u201d neighborhood like the one I lived in.\u00a0 Muggers had taken to getting off the expressways in \u201csafe\u201d neighborhoods early in the morning and mugging old ladies as they walked to Early Mass at church.\u00a0 And they didn\u2019t just get robbed they were often brutalized pretty badly.\u00a0 Apparently, a baseball bat to the shoulder from behind is an excellent way to make an old lady drop her pocketbook.\u00a0 And thinking about what it would cost to put my young children in good schools in New York just wasn\u2019t in the cards for me at that time.\u00a0 So, we moved out into the \u201ccountry.\u201d\u00a0 Or so we called it.\u00a0 Really it was outer suburbia in New England but there were farms and cows and so we told our kids they lived in the country.\u00a0 Fast forward twenty-five years and we moved again out of the \u201ccountry\u201d because it became too crowded.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s just what growth looks like.\u00a0 Instead of 275 million people now there are 330 million people.\u00a0 But moving from outer suburbia to a more rural area is a matter of choice and temperament, not a life or death decision.\u00a0 I like more trees and fewer stop lights.\u00a0 I want a quiet environment rather than a busy commercial strip.\u00a0 But the next guy might like to live in a small town so he can walk to get his cup of coffee and doughnut.\u00a0 He likes to have a French restaurant and a yoga studio a few blocks away.\u00a0 Vive la diff\u00e9rence.<\/p>\n
But instead, let\u2019s say you live in Minneapolis or Philadelphia or Baltimore or even my old home town of New York City.\u00a0 For the sake of argument let\u2019s say you live right outside of New York City in a very expensive suburb.\u00a0 You pay an enormous amount of money to buy a house there and you pay taxes that are almost obscene.\u00a0 Let\u2019s say the schools are good and the amenities in your town are excellent.\u00a0 Great restaurants and stores.\u00a0 Good health clubs and a very nice golf course that you enjoy.\u00a0 And crime is reasonable.\u00a0 Sure, there are property crimes that happen, burglaries and car theft but violent crime while not unknown is infrequent because you have a good police force that prevents that sort of thing.\u00a0 Your very nice gated community is a haven from the urban existence that you can see on the horizon.<\/p>\n
But then something happens.\u00a0 A cop in a city with a Democratic mayor kills a black man during an arrest.\u00a0 And he does it in front of a video camera and it looks terrible.\u00a0 People in this liberal city in this liberal state feel outraged.\u00a0 The very liberal mayor fires the cops involved and says an investigation will judge whether the law was broken.\u00a0 Nothing unusual there.\u00a0 This has happened before.\u00a0 But this mayor is extremely weak.\u00a0 When the protests begin, he warns the police to back off.\u00a0 They do.\u00a0 And the protestors are heavily infiltrated by Antifa and anarchists and probably BLM.\u00a0 They don\u2019t just protest.\u00a0 They riot, loot and burn down a sizable area of the downtown.\u00a0 Does the mayor decide to put a stop to the violence after that?\u00a0 Far from it.\u00a0 He orders the police to abandon their precinct to the mob.\u00a0 Now the devastation becomes extensive and drunk with the victory of the city\u2019s capitulation they decide to extend their reign of terror and head out into the suburbs of the next city over.\u00a0 And when the Democratic governor realizes that the Mayor is useless, he proves that he is equally useless and only sends a few hundred National Guardsmen in and mostly just to guard the electric power station and Federal Reserve Bank building.\u00a0 So now the rioters are free to continue their arson and looting.<\/p>\n
After this has gone on for a day or two the inner-city denizens and the local Antifa cohorts in every major city decide it\u2019s time to set up a local chapter of burn everything down and steal whatever comes to hand.\u00a0 So now it gets real for you.\u00a0 You\u2019re watching on tv as the metropolis that\u2019s fifteen minutes away begins to go up in flames and the cops stand down at the behest of Bill de Blasio in order not to annoy his constituency while they enjoy their first amendment right to loot and burn other people\u2019s life\u2019s savings.\u00a0 And in a video on social media you hear the rioters tell you, seemingly you in particular, that they\u2019re headed out to your suburb to bring the same treatment to you and yours.<\/p>\n
Well, that\u2019s got to be an eye opener.\u00a0 And the more you think about it the more you realize that there\u2019s not a damn thing anyone is going to do to end this cycle.\u00a0 This happens periodically.\u00a0 First it happened in 1965, then in 1977.\u00a0 In the late seventies through the early nineties it never really stopped.\u00a0 The violence and crime were continuous.\u00a0 Giuliani was a change in New York. \u00a0He was the last gasp of a majority that would allow the police to keep the criminal elements under strict control.\u00a0 The nineties were peaceful and prosperous for New York.\u00a0 But Giuliani was term limited out in 2001.\u00a0 Bloomberg left the police in place but constantly railed against them in the press.\u00a0 By the time Obama and de Blasio were in the White House and Gracie Mansion respectively, it was open season on the police and law and order too.\u00a0 Eric Holder demonized the police and spawned Black Lives Matter.\u00a0 Now you could say that President Trump is a reaction to Obama and the Ferguson scam that keeps being perpetrated on the people.\u00a0 And he can do a lot to prevent this stuff spreading to red states.\u00a0 But if you live in a blue state and especially if you live close to one of the big cities in them you are at ground zero for every wave of the roller coaster.<\/p>\n
And that brings me to my point.<\/p>\n
Move.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no good reason to live there.\u00a0 The bad reasons are that it\u2019s your home.\u00a0 And it\u2019s where your family lives.\u00a0 I don\u2019t live near one of the big cities but I wish I were a thousand miles away in a red state.\u00a0 But I have kids and grandkids that have roots here.\u00a0 And every day I try to figure out how to get us all out.\u00a0 But if you\u2019re starting out now or are going to start a family, get out now.\u00a0 Head south and west and look for a state that is run by normal people and isn\u2019t filled with people who don\u2019t have any stuff but want your stuff instead.\u00a0 I assure you from sad experience, it\u2019s no way to live.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
About 33 years ago I moved out of New York City.\u00a0 Now I was born and bred there.\u00a0 My family had lived there for four<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[328,2255,2254,2514,234,2520,517],"class_list":["post-11073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","tag-antifa","tag-bill-de-blasio","tag-black-lives-matter","tag-black-rioting","tag-crime","tag-red-state-blue-state","tag-rudy-giuliani"],"yoast_head":"\n