There was a story I saw of a police call to deal with some squatters in an apartment and when the cops arrived they found several children in the home living in utter squalor and clearly suffering from malnutrition and abuse. Do keep in mind, that the filth – which must have caused a stench – and the neglected/abused children did not trigger police action. It was that there were squatters. The cops can come out for that, I guess – but for massive health hazards and abused human beings, not so much.

This happened just now – in an America which is awash in social programs for people who are poor. Heck, even people who aren’t all that poor can avail themselves of large amounts of government assistance. The USA spends a total of about $5 trillion per year in social spending. This does not include the massive amounts spent in private charity. This is federal, State and local government spending. That’s about $15,000 per year for every man, woman and child in the United States. It isn’t that we’re not spending money to help. The adults in charge of those children could easily have obtained lots of assistance for rent, utilities, food, education, health care and so forth. They did none of that – the kids were basically left to starve unless they could pick up some food that the adults left lying around when not high as kites.

This is barbarism – with a little worse as at least barbarians will make an attempt to look after the helpless. But, make no mistake about it, that wasn’t a priority. In barbarian tribes the men eat first and most, then comes the women, then the children and old people; with old people kicked to the curb in times of dearth. What we have done is created brand, new barbarians – and they didn’t even have to hammer down the gates; we made them out of our own people.

It took a thousand years of whippings and hangings to turn wolves into men and we’re undoing all that in far less than a century. Those videos you see of mobs of people engaging in street brawls are another part of it: barbarians easily take offense and view violence as a first resort. The decay of our cities. The decline of knowledge and enterprise (barbarians are also lazy – doing just enough to get by and always willing to steal in preference to work). If this trend persists for just another few decades, it is done – civilization will be gone.

We can still avoid such a fate – but we have to act now and with great force. You can’t reason with a stoned person living in filth while their children starve. You can’t reason with someone who loots the only store in their neighborhood where they can buy medicine. You can’t reason with thieves and street brawlers. No more than the builders of civilization could reason with their savage populations. You can only force people to be decent. There is no other way to do it. All of you who remain well mannered and adhere to standards of decency only do so because you were told to…and in the long run, the reason you were told was because an ancestor of yours saw a man drawn and quartered for being a barbarian. Civilized behavior is force reduced to habit and hiding its claws. It is time for the claws to come back out.

But as of this moment, I don’t enough people see the need. It isn’t so bad just yet. Sure, a neighbor had his car stolen from his driveway a couple blocks over and that is unusual in my suburban world, as is the sudden appearance of one or two abandoned shopping carts. But no need to worry, right? It’ll be fine. Just go with the flow. Don’t get upset! And the further you get out from the centers of decay, the less urgent it all seems.

But make no mistake about it – it is creeping day by day closer to you. Your completely stable, small community of like-minded citizens is under siege…and the barbarians, once they are done looting their own homes, will come for yours. As I said, a barbarian prefers to not work…stealing your stuff is easier, and fun (for them; not so for you). We must wake up now.

That is, we must take whip and noose in hand and simply start to deal with these people. They aren’t citizens. The only reason we don’t kill them all is because underneath their savage exterior is a human being – God’s creation. But outside of that, they are a menace to be controlled, not citizens to discuss matters with. We have to start beating the savages into submission. To make them obey the rules even though they very much don’t want to.

Or, we can drift along hoping it all blows over. You know, like the Romans in, say, 390 AD.