If the world and the humans inhabiting it were evolving towards the positive, I believe I would be more supportive of progressives. But near as I can tell in my 47 years, man is not generally predisposed to good. Sure, there are many good people. But there’s a reason you lock your car door when you’re in the mall. Or you lock your house when you’re gone or sleeping. Someone will steal your property from you, or worse.
Here in California, things have really started to go off the deep end. From SF Gate:
A KPIX news cameraman was punched and robbed during a live broadcast outside an Oakland high school, the latest in a spate of holdups targeting the media, police said Thursday.
Reporter Anne Makovec and cameraman Gregg Welk were on the air shortly after noon Wednesday outside Oakland Technical High School near the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway. They were at the school to do a story on the passage of Proposition 30, the tax measure preventing deep cuts to education.
As Makovec was finishing her report, police said, five men rushed up and grabbed a $6,000 camera from the tripod. Viewers saw the live picture being jarred and turned sideways for about two seconds.
One of the assailants punched Welk in the mouth before the group fled in a Mercedes-Benz, which apparently was accompanied by a Lexus, police said. Welk declined treatment by paramedics but saw his doctor.
And that was not an isolated incident. The media has been robbed numerous times in the East Bay, including Oakland Tribune photographer Laura Oda who has twice been robbed of cameras since July, a KTVU news crew robbed of a computer, camera and tripod by several men who pushed their way into their van parked on Redwood Road in the Oakland hills in June, and a man stole a camera and tripod from a KNTV crew at 20th Street and San Pablo Avenue in May.
For their part, the old media have been relatively silent. One would think that it would be in their best interests to broadcast the stories far and wide to not only point out the problem(s) but also protect their crews lives when they head out to cover stories in the future. But that’s where things get sticky. Strong law enforcement and individual self-protection aren’t exactly pillars of the progressive movement. So how do you protect your crews when you can’t really talk about what happened because it would highlight significant issues with California as a progressive social experiment? Simple. You can’t.
So, while San Fransisco focuses on important issues, like paying for citizens to have sex change operations, the media ignores wanton violence against its own employees because it doesn’t fit The Narrative. And the reality is that this is the new normal. More and more people know that the government will help them, and that the help is not contingent on anything other than simple economic qualification. There is no positive behavior modification required, voluntary or otherwise. You don’t even have to affect a pretense that you’re a good person, morally, ethically, or legally. You can have a criminal record a mile long, be a wife abuser, a child molester, a rapist, you name it, but a pulse and proof of income are the only requirements for eligibility for a whole host of social programs.
When there is no incentive to behave, and in fact shameless people are monetarily rewarded even when they don’t behave, what message are we sending as a society? Is it really a surprise that people are becoming increasingly brazen and cruel in taking property that doesn’t belong to them? Of course not. We teach and reinforce that behavior from cradle to grave. We call it Social Services and we pat ourselves on the back for our high-minded and charitable ways.