Enough Empathy: the Case for Punching Down

“…because heedless empathy for the worst among us is currently leading us on the downward-sloping path to mediocrity and beyond.”

Most of us may not realize it as yet, but we are now locked in an existential battle, with our very culture and civilization on the line. On one side are all the people of every race, class, religion, gender and sexual orientation who want to live in a safe, sane, orderly, productive, dynamic, and creative society that rewards talent, hard work, character, and grit. On the other side are thugs, bums, boors, law-breakers, rule-flouters, responsibility-shirkers, couch-surfers, space-wasters, and freeloaders. By all rights, this should be a case of no-contest. There is but one problem: the second group has the most powerful and influential elites in politics, media, academia, and the entertainment industry on its side. Many among these elites are precisely those who were handed their high-flown perches as a result of inherited privilege—familial wealth and connections, legacy admissions and so on—and, wracked by guilt in holding onto something they didn’t earn, work out their personal psychodramas by posturing themselves as opponents of the system that made them what they are. They hold together and command a ragtag coalition of disparate identity groups, including people with entirely divergent economic interests, under the “progressive” umbrella by drumming up a seemingly endless series of fake panics and crises—#MeToo and patriarchy, #BlackLivesMatter, white supremacy and white privilege, cultural appropriation, transphobia, Islamophobia, Donald Trump, a crackdown on all immigrants and so on—to which the appropriate reaction is inevitably some species of outrage and hysteria. In the process, they are ruining this country for the rest of us.

The New York subways are a microcosm of how this culture war is playing out. As someone who has never owned a car, hardly ever uses cabs, Ubers, etc. and takes subways and buses at all times of day and night, I have observed the same thing remarked on by many other straphangers: behavior in our public transportation system is totally out of control. People are routinely taking up multiple seats and putting their dirty feet up on seats as if they were in their own living rooms. More people than ever cannot be bothered to use headphones to listen to their tunes. Speaking volume keeps on getting louder. We are being bombarded by loud and proud profanity-laced music and dialogue. At my local stop, operating with seeming impunity, the same two or three ne’er-do-wells break the MetroCard vending machines on an almost daily basis and hover by the turnstiles to sell swipes. Overlapping waves of panhandlers—the same bums, junkies and winos day in and day out, spinning out the same worn-out yarn about how they are out-of-work veterans just trying to scramble together another $2.13 to buy a sandwich—are working their way through the subway cars.

Most obviously, ever since Mayor Bill de Blasio took it upon himself, elevating a narrow SJW conception of civil rights over the broader and more basic human right to a safe city, to end broken windows policing, disempower law enforcement, and unleash the homeless upon the city, our streets and our public spaces—but especially our subway trains and stations—are being deluged. Predictably, with the number of homeless in the subway up a whopping 23% over last year, service disruptions caused by the homeless making trouble are also way up, from 254 a decade ago to 856 in 2018 and on pace to shatter that record by as much as 50% in 2019. These “incidents,” of course, do not encompass those quality of life issues — let’s call them hygienic disruptions to service—that can make entire train cars uninhabitable, especially in the dead of winter at night, when the E train (which stays underground and, therefore, warm all along its route), also known as “The Homeless Express,” sometimes carries as many as 70 homeless people on board (which, with 11 cars per train, breaks down to between six and seven in every car). Mayor de Blasio’s emasculated officers of the law, as The New York Times reports, are permitted to do no more than ask if homeless people on the trains would like to go to a shelter, only to be met with predictable resounding no’s.