The Choices We Make
The Choices We Make
Somebody good at the economy, please help! Black people are being killed in the street.
Here is one of roughly 50 good tweets to ever exist:
The thought of a family dying in this scenario is funny due to the premise that the family patriarch is spending $3,600 on candles rather than the immediate material needs of his family.
This scenario isn’t nearly as funny when it’s gamed out in reality:
You can tell everything you need to know about a society by the allocations within its annual budget.
For years, Columbus’ Corporate Democrat overlords have pranced around the town drinking cocktails with the wealthy out-of-state real estate developers while posting about how the Discovery City is one of the best places in the world to reside. Look at us, they say! We have murals and an art district!
Here is a scene from *checks notes* three months ago from Mayor Ginther’s State of the City Address:
The mayor raised $74,500 to stage his speech, much of it from firms with multimillion-dollar city contracts. The money transformed part of the crumbling West High — with its shattered windows above an emergency exit to the auditorium — into multiple large video screens, lights, sound system and control panels.
Our city doesn’t have enough money to replace a broken window in a public school that was erected in 1929. This broken window wasn’t good enough for the mayor and his corporate cronies for one night because it goes against the narrative he pushed that night, namely that Columbus is a progressive oasis in a bastion of Republicanism.
That broken window is apparently fine for the school children from that same neighborhood that’s not good enough for the Mayor’s kids:
“It’s not a place where I would want my children to grow up,” said Mayor Andrew J. Ginther, who recently purchased a $525,000 house in the Knolls on the Northwest Side.
I have the lowest opinion possible of Mayor Ginther, and yet I’m astounded that he was dumb enough to say this on the record to a reporter. However, it illuminates why he sends his children to Columbus Academy rather than the top-rated public school that’s literally a block from his house. His power insulates him from the real-life consequences of his budgetary decisions.
I revisit this quote a lot because it infuriates me. One of my biggest regrets in life is not taking my education seriously. A small cadre of public school teachers is the only reason I am able to pass myself off as a semi-educated man.
Americans love to think we live in a meritocracy. The sad truth is the zip code of your birth determines your fate in a way that Americans would label as a caste system if it existed in a foreign country populated by brown people.
Education is the only shot a lot of these neighborhood kids will ever have at breaking the cycle of poverty that they were born into. And we can’t even scrounge up enough money to replace a fucking broken window in their school; we’d rather paper-over it for a couple of hours when the mayor and his corporate paypigs come to feed at the trough.
Not only do we rob schools of proper funding by throwing out tax abatements to developers, we also spend five-times of our education budget on the local police force.
Keep in mind that the above chart does not include the $1.06 million that the city paid out to citizens for police conduct last year alone. That probably could have replaced every window in the school system.
Our local progressive political machine has acquiesced to every inane request from the Columbus Police Department as if they are the only thing standing between us and ISIS. And to what ends? If you murder someone in Columbus, there is a 60% chance you will never be arrested.
These fascist Army cosplayers couldn’t even keep a gang of unruly teenagers from ransacking the Statehouse in the middle of downtown. Their only skill is using their fancy hand-me-downs from the military to brutalize peaceful protests who congregate in the same place at the same time every day.
The most mind-numbing part is now we have to watch our self-anointed progressive leaders that erected this monstrosity pretend that they should be the ones trusted with reforming it.
Columbus Attorney Zach Klein spends his days at Orange Theory in Grandview fantasizing about his next election. He has spent the last year daydreaming about taking a job within the Biden Administration rather than hold a single cop accountable for the wanton abuse that has propelled tens of thousands of citizens into the streets during a global pandemic.
I have to hand it to the voters that take their marching orders from a Sample Ballot mailed to them by the local political elites. City Council Members don’t even have to win an election. They appoint people so they can run as incumbents, and local voters lapped up this anti-democratic gruel in exchange for increased property values and a revamped Short North District that has less culture than a Waffle House.
The time for “recommendations” had already passed before protests erupted over the last week. We would not be in this situation if the cops seriously reckoned with recommendations from community leaders.
We would not have Vice Presidents in the Fraternal Order of Police vilifying the free press by sharing white-pride propaganda from racist outlets like Breitbart:
The cops seem themselves at war with their fellow citizens, and it’s time to treat them as such. Cops will behave this way until their union contracts are gutted and “qualified immunity” is thrown into the dustbin of history.
Non-violent protests only work if your opponent has a conscience, of which anybody who took tear gas into their lungs in the last week can attest cops are devoid.
Do not fall for the kumbuya okie-doke and corporate half-measures pushed by grifters like DeRay McKesson. Especially do not fall for any okie-doke from the milquetoast politicians that led us into this nightmare scenario in the first place.
The only way forward is to burn the entire system down — unless we want to do this all over again in a couple of months when another gang of unaccountable pigs murders a black person on camera.
Personally, I’ve seen enough of this world and am ready to build one anew from the ashes we must create.
Only then will America become half the country we pretend to be.