I went on a date with this woman once—one of those self-proclaimed “good moms.” You know the type. The ones who brag about how open they are with their kids, how they let their teenage sons bring their girlfriends over for sleepovers, condoms neatly stacked in the bathroom drawer like fresh towels. “Better they do it here than in some car,” she said, smiling like she deserved a medal.
I nodded, sipped my drink, and imagined the teenage version of myself in that situation. Would I have respected my mother if she let me do that? Would I have even seen her as a mother?
I remembered a kid from high school—his dad let us smoke weed in the garage. “Rather you do it here than somewhere dangerous,” he’d say, tossing us a lighter. We thought he was cool. A real chill dad. His son died of an overdose at 24. Or worse—lived, working the graveyard shift at a Petco warehouse, stoned out of his mind just to make it bearable.
This is the shit we’ve allowed.
I grew up hearing stories about how things used to be. How men used to protect their neighborhoods. If someone didn’t belong, if some junkie set up camp in your alley, if some punk started stealing from the local store, the men handled it. Bats, gasoline, and a warning: Get the fuck out.
Now?
Now, we step over human shit in front of Safeway and pretend it’s normal. Now, we let security guards babysit criminals instead of beating the hell out of them. Now, we let people die in the street from fentanyl and call it a “housing crisis.”
I live near a park. It used to be a place where kids played, where families had picnics, where you could sit on a bench and watch the world go by. Now it’s a marketplace for drugs, a graveyard for people still breathing.
I watch a man walk past my house, slow, deliberate, pulling from a crack pipe like it’s a goddamn cigar. Two guys huddle near a busted picnic table, cash and powder changing hands. I go to Fry’s, and the parking lot is a circus—junkies, shoplifters, security wrestling some overdosed husk of a human being back to life.
And we’re supposed to just live with this?
A woman told me once about a dog she adopted. It bit her finger, got infected, sent her to the hospital. Thousands in medical bills, a mess of X-rays, and nearly lost her damn hand. And you know what she did? She kept the dog. She adjusted her life around the problem. Avoided certain rooms. Moved slower, spoke softer. Because, as she put it, It’s not the dog’s fault.
That’s exactly what we’re doing with society.
Instead of dealing with the problem, we adjust.
Instead of throwing the junkies out, we let stores remove seating so they don’t loiter.
Instead of cracking down on theft, we put everything behind lock and key.
Instead of holding criminals accountable, we let cops ticket working people for rolling through a stop sign while the guy with a stolen Target cart full of electronics walks free.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that standing up for ourselves was mean. That demanding better was cruel. That we had to tolerate this decline, this rot, because, well, these people have nowhere else to go.
No.
“I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
That’s what we should be screaming. That’s what should be echoing down the streets, bouncing off boarded-up windows, shaking the tent cities to their foundation.
But it won’t.
Because we’ve been conditioned to step aside.
To keep our heads down.
To let it happen.
And maybe that’s the worst part. Not the crime. Not the filth. Not even the decay itself.
But the fact that we’ve accepted it.
