Keep Citizens Safe

All levels of government are currently failing their No. 1 priority.

The government’s No. 1 duty is to protect its citizens. Failing that mandate, the government should at least prioritize protecting marginalized communities under their jurisdiction. Yet the increasing realization is that the bums who lead us can’t even muster protecting pedestrians.

I went to Cleveland this weekend and took an inaugural voyage on “the Rapid,” which is what locals call Cleveland’s underfunded, decades-old light rail system. Yet it’s without question the most enjoyable, cheapest and easiest to use mass transit system in Ohio. It’s a shame Big Oil owns every level of our government, otherwise state and federal money could turn it into the crown of the midwest.

A couple hours later, Citizen, the vigilante app that dreams of privatizing police, alerted her that a vehicle had struck a six-year-old girl down the street from our house.

Did she live? Well, this story didn’t interest any local media outlet enough to write about it, so the best option I have is asking the residents of the house that I walk past nearly every day to the corner store. That could potentially get me shot, and for good reason.

This is the kind of violence that for some reason the local media outlets don’t feel like rattling their sabers about violent crime besieging the city.

Lord knows what the response would be if this happened in the suburbs. There would be weeping mothers on the nightly news and speed bumps would be installed overnight.

As it should be. This kind of violence is just as preventable as mass shootings. The answers are equally rudimentary.

Up until 72 hours ago, I love living on a street where kids play outside on the street. That’s why I fretted whenever some asshole blazed down the street at any hour of the day. Motherfucker, there are kids on this street.

Not like I’m going to call the cops. What are they going to do other than shoot someone for speeding down a residential street?

You have no other choice than to shake your head and hope for the best. Should the worst happen, your federal and state government didn’t care enough to invest in mass transit in the first place and your local leaders won’t even hear about it because none of them live in the neighborhood.

The driver won’t be caught unless they have a sudden stroke of conscience and decide to turn themselves in.

That’s the arbitrary nature of how we protect life in America. Four teens overdose on original FourLoko recipe and we ban mixing alcohol and caffeine though both substances remain widely available within our borders.

We hardly blink at the violence caused by vehicles killing and maiming pedestrians. We accept that there’s nothing more to it than looking both ways before we cross a street. Isn’t that one of the first rules we learn in our car-first society? Anybody who can’t handle that probably had it coming.

Maybe one day we will stop worshiping at the altar of the car, though that will probably take at least 50 more oil pipelines bursting and the entire ocean catching on fire.

Until then we will continue making sacrifices. And our only protection will be crossing our fingers and hoping tragedy doesn’t strike anyone we know.

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