City Hall Surrenders Sidewalks To Homeless

Rather than bothering to defend the rule of law -- and common sense -- in the courts, City Hall has surrendered the public sidewalks to the ACLU.

According to the L.A. Times, a settlement agreement between the City of Los Angeles and the ACLU "would also establish a downtown area — bounded by Central Avenue and Los Angeles, 3rd and 7th streets — where homeless people would be allowed to sleep on sidewalks at night without challenge by police or business owners."

How incredibly gutless can one collection of elected officials be? The City of L.A. has set a new standard -- a new low, that is.

Can someone pinpoint for me the point in history when we lost our collective mind? Can someone explain why the law-abiding, taxpaying citizens of our city must allow people to live on the sidewalks? Just when did we decide that the mentally ill and drunk can no longer be scooped up and taken somewhere for psychiatric treatment or a "drunk tank," respectively?

And is it supposedly "humane" to pretend people who clearly cannot take care of themselves have a "right" to camp on sidewalks?

This city will become a case study on what happens when apathetic citizens leave control of public policy to career politicians whose only interest is maintaining political office. Every day, L.A. becomes more of a Third World Country, and more of a monument to the insanity of political correctness.

Our police, already prohibited from enforcing federal immigration law, will now be prohibited from exerting control over our sidewalks. Why? Because none of our elected officials has the guts to stand up for the average taxpaying citizen. Instead, they are afraid of appearing "insensitive" to the "plight" of the "homeless." Apparently none of them understood that the story about the "Emperor's New Clothes" wasn't about clothes at all, but was instead about having the courage to tell the truth.

Meanwhile, thanks to these same career politicians, the poor are taxed to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to rich developers -- so they can build ever more dense housing, thereby ruining the distinctive character of our low-rise city, and aggravating the now perpetual gridlock. And, not content with the current torrent of tax dollars flowing from the middle class to the billionaires, they have put Measure H on the ballot, to add another $2 billion tax burden on homeowners for the next 20 years.

Schools, meanwhile, are not preparing children to function productively in our culture. Instead, they teach that all cultures are created equal, all behavior is acceptable, and, if you come here from abroad, it is America's duty to learn your language and customs, not the other way around. No one stops to think that the reason most countries are train wrecks whose inhabitants flee is, in large part, their cultures. It's not as though every Third World country lacks resources, after all. On the contrary, most have tremendous natural resources. The reason for their perpetual poverty lies elsewhere.

Here, however, we daily abandon the very precepts that made our city a great place to live. Ever wonder what the decline of the Roman Empire was like? Look around: you're living it.