A nightmare in Bellingham

Dear M,

People who say “love is love” are morons. Living in Washington taught me that. They never ask “how” or “for whom,” and they somehow have the idea that you can just love and everything will turn out great.

If they’d ask questions it wouldn’t be so simple. For instance, is politics — one of the dirtiest and most unscrupulous games we play — love? Aren't you fighting for somebody when you’re fighting somebody else? Can you love a criminal and a victim at the same time? Isn’t love a choice toward one person or one group of people —and an exclusion of some others? When you marry a woman and make a baby with her, don’t you have an obligation to your family — and not to a family in Mexico? And how far can you go with it? Does your love for your family mean you can do whatever you want with somebody else’s? Isn’t love the source of all hate? Is love the same thing as lust? Can real love only happen without lust? What if you love yourself? What if you didn’t? Would that make you a better person? Would we even survive if we were “better” people?

Not to make things too difficult, but if we don’t think difficult things then we experience worse — and we drag the people we love through it too. Washington is experiencing this right now, a kind of political Christianity without heaven or salvation* or Jesus and thus leading to Hell. In other words a reaching out to the worst of us and finding out that in order to love them we would have to hate the best of us. Jesus Christ said unless a man hates his father and his mother he cannot follow me. This is a hard saying, but no harder than unless a man hates an upstanding family, he cannot love a junkie.

Which is exactly what we’re finding out right now. My case in point takes place in Bellingham, a once-idyllic college town way north of Seattle. It may have been the colleges that ruined it. One moment they were doing fine, and then someone started asking what they could do for the downtrodden. Next thing you know, the downtrodden are arriving en masse and people are getting robbed and shit is darkening the streets and the mayor gets chased out of city hall by Antifa. This last part seems like rhetoric, but it’s the literal history. You can see things like it on video, and the cops, standing against hordes of ugly green-haired gender-fluid youngsters, stood by and took a beating over it.

But the city is a birds-eye view of the tragedy; a catastrophe made digestible with statistics, and painful stories that get smoothed into pie charts. When you get up close it looks much different. Like Yeager’s, a sporting goods store that’s clean and friendly and family-run for over a hundred years, currently manned by a woman — and a good one, who recently lost her husband to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

This owner, to any upright person, is exactly the kind of woman you want for a neighbor and a fellow citizen. She works her own family business and loves God and raised five great kids and pays her taxes and would be respected, I think, by the best of our ancestors. I’ve known her for a long time, and I can’t think of anybody better to go to church with, or to leave my kids with, or who I’d be prouder to have in office. Her son asked to keep her name secret, so we’ll call her Pam.

Pam’s been running Yeager’s for years now, and you can see her featuring locals on her Facebook page, and throwing sales on hard-to-find items. But lately things have changed. Instead of featuring locals she’s featuring more criminals. Her son (whose official job is managing the ski and paddle section) spends most of his time in loss-prevention, and he apprehends junkies and lowlifes almost constantly.

Recently he caught a bum and was told to “call the cops, they won’t do anything anyway.” And they won’t. The city of Bellingham won’t prosecute many minor offenses; and the criminals walk free, maybe back to Yeager’s, maybe to another mom-and-pop store until whole families drown like even Walmart did in Portland. None of her children have been stabbed, or shot. But the likelihood increases every year as strangers with nothing to live for keep stealing from families worth living in.

A couple of men broke in recently and stole a thousand dollars worth of stuff. Before that others stole $6,000, and before that others stole $3,000**. But like the pie charts and statistics, the dollar sign obscures the real meaning of the offense. As such it wasn’t a number out of a vault or an account, but the bread and butter off the family plate, a chance at retiring, somebody going to college. Every burglary that happens to Yeager’s drives Pam closer and closer towards red ink. Every thief is chipping away at the hard work and love and investment of generations — from the legacy of grandparents to the inheritance of grandchildren. And none of the above burglaries, she says, were covered by insurance.

The men and women who know how to provide for others are being bankrupted by the men and women who know how only to steal from others — to ruin others; to drown whole families without apology, without mercy, without conscience. A burglary used to happen every five or so years at Yeager’s. This year they’ve had five. And there’s nobody coming to save them. According to KING 5 news, judge Debra Lev wants to give all non-violent offenders counseling and more benefits instead of jail time. She calls this “restorative justice,” an attempt to make everyone whole except victims.

What’s most frustrating is that these junkies are backed by a self-righteous mob. A mob that asks for more tent cities for junkies, for less rules for junkies, for more money for junkies. Which in the end leads Bellingham to more junkies. When the police try to clear out the encampments they get hooted and pelted by hordes of the “compassionate.” They are, in essence, armies of people compassionate to lone deadbeats and junkies. Who do they make war on? Mothers and children.

I wonder how long good families can survive in Bellingham. And if they can’t, how long it will be until families take matters into their own hands — and whether the city and the media will actively prosecute them first. It’s only a matter of time before people start asking dangerous questions, such as whether it would be better to have the Mafia than to be ruled by the “empathetic.” After all we’ve seen many great cities run by the Mafia. We’ve only seen great cities ruined by the compassionate.

Yours,

-J

*I said leftism is a Christianity without salvation, but it fact someone can get “saved,” and Eric Hoffer, writing in The True Believer, puts it better than anybody else.

The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.

But not everybody is convinced of the holiness of “selflessness.” Ayn Rand writes, in The Voice of Reason:

Nobody respects an altruist, neither in private life nor in international affairs. An altruist is a person who keeps sacrificing himself and his values, which means: sacrificing his friends to his enemies, his allies to his antagonists, his interests to any cry for help, his strength to anyone’s weakness, his convictions to anyone’s wishes, the truth to any lie, the good to any evil. How would you tell an altruist’s treacherously unpredictable policy from that of a cowardly milquetoast? And what difference would it make to his victims? A man practicing such a policy would be mistrusted and despised by everyone, including the profiteers on his “generosity.”

And that’s exactly what’s happened. The junkies and radicals aren’t even converted to the mayor’s side. They treat him like what he is — a treacherous piece of shit.

**Pam isn’t just a story. She’s a real person I know suffering a real injustice, and I want you to see what she wrote me, in her own words:

Night burglars took $3,000 worth of merchandise the first time, and  $6,000 worth of merchandise the second time. They stole a vehicle the third time. They were thwarted the 4th and 5th time.  We've had to do thousands of dollars in repairs.  They have cut through barbed wire fencing, used blow torches and bolt cutters, a sledge hammer and crow bars.  They have cut through walls.  Tell me, could your home stand up to this? By the time the alarm is tripped and police or the security company arrives on site, they are gone their  booty, which they sell for cash any of the daily stolen merchandise fencing operations in the Winco parking lot.  They do this in broad daylight. Lines of vagrants pour out from the huge homeless camps with their stolen goods sell to buyers in cars and vans, and then use the cash for drugs.  The buyers will take their loads to Seattle, or simply sell online, sometimes using the hotel rooms and free -wi-fi provided by the city for "the homeless".   

 Organized retail thieves usually have a team of two to five people hitting the store at once, some as decoys,  and others running out different exits, with a vehicle and driver waiting outside.  If we do manage to run down and grab a shoplifter ourselves, they know they will not go to jail.  And our shoplifting losses are not covered by insurance.   Most of our shoplifters have a pocket full of active warrants and failures to appear.  Nothing is done about it. And why would they?  They can't jail someone for mere property crimes when violent crimes have risen to historic levels. Even those are now being shrugged away. 

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