We have a mental health crisis dressed up as politics

For a few days at the end of 2011 and the opening of 2012, a wave of nighttime arson fires swept across Los Angeles. There would be 55 in all, and they would be extraordinarily damaging, targeting densely parked cars in carports underneath apartment buildings so the fires would quickly threaten homes and the people sleeping inside them. Watching the destruction spread across the city, speculation ran wild: a giant band of trained arsonists, sent by al-Qaeda?

It wasn’t. It was one dumb-as-dirt nutjob, too pathetic to discuss in any detail. His brilliant technique was to stuff some cubes of hardware store fire-starter into the wheel well of a car, then light it up and run like crazy. He had no training or craft beyond the crushingly obvious, no motive worthy of anything but an eyeroll, and not much ability to evade detection. Police agencies flooded the streets with volunteers and cops on overtime, and the idiot was caught by an unpaid reserve deputy from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who recognized his car from the many witness descriptions.

That volunteer cop was the son of Armenian immigrants, and L.A.’s large Armenian community threw a long series of banquets and parties — gleefully proud that one of theirs had made a positive contribution to their chosen country, working hard and being useful in a new place.

The appearance of extraordinarily dangerous disorder was deceptive. An act that was widely attributed to a band of trained terrorists was one imbecile with a stupid grudge. A bigger group of people were committed to order, to peace, and to the protection of the community, and they fixed the problem.

This is all of life and a useful thing to remember in this long historical moment of manufactured crisis. It's difficult to build, but remarkably easy to destroy.

People who make things do it more quietly than the armies of half-wit nihilists who live to produce noisy ruin. Notice them.

To use an example from last week, it takes a lot of planning and effort to put on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and a handful of narcissistic jerks to disrupt it. So we see the disruption, and we conclude that we're facing a decline and a loss of order.

Put a thousand good people, working and building, alongside a half-dozen preening cultural arsonists, and the prevailing impression is of destruction. The small band of destroyers creates an image that can, and often does, prevail over the image of the thing that the larger group built.

American culture is currently dominated, in appearance, by the relentlessly destructive scum of the earth, dim-witted and amoral self-promoters who endlessly gibber pathetic nihilistic babble about the dumbest and most useless set of pretend ideas a living being could possibly invent. These repulsive pieces of human garbage, endlessly impeding and ruining, look significant. They’re not.

The Antifa trash and the Black Lives Matter grifters and the brain-dead pro-Hamas trash flooding campuses and big cities are loud. The end.

The Adam Schiffs and Liz Cheneys, the Jamaal Bowman fire alarm-prankster cultural vandals, the Rashida Tlaib murder-worshippers are a completely worthless noise-producing machine. They are hollow. (See Christopher Rufo for details.) History will roll past these ruin-makers and reduce them to the footnote they’ve always been.

Whatever they appear to be saying, what they’re actually saying is that they want to burn down a society that doesn’t elevate their useless lives to the high status that they mistakenly think they deserve. We have a mental health crisis dressed up as politics. Don’t honor it by believing it to be powerful.

Ideologically deranged government impedes and impedes and impedes, and I speak as a Californian who lives that reality daily. But in the face of an endless wave of dumb laws and ruinously stupid regulations, despite the absurdity of being pretend-governed by a corrupt and senile figurehead president and a worthless gang of congressional midgets, there is meat on your table, and flipping a light switch turns on the lights. The narrative about ruin and decline marches on alongside a country full of people who grow food and drive trucks and stock shelves.

People who make things do it more quietly than the armies of half-wit nihilists who live to produce noisy ruin. Notice them. I wonder every day if the destroyers will win, but so far, they haven’t. The quiet production of order and plenty can prevail. See the makers. They're all around you. Be grateful.