I just sent my kids back to their mom for the rest of the summer, so a semblance of peace and quiet is returning to my little home. My son really likes his little brother, and my daughter is growing up fast and becoming quite competent for an eight-year-old. I’m still a bit of a softy on the chores, but the kids are finally pitching in meaningfully. Nevertheless, two small children without school to keep them busy and a newborn are quite a handful, so “vacation” hardly describes my life over the last couple weeks.
For the last week or so, the story dominating the news has been the death of Michael Brown following a robbery. I’ve found myself frustrated and disappointed by the massive support Brown is receiving from some quarters. One of the reasons I left Seattle recently is that with kids the only places I could reasonably expect to rent are in neighborhoods where robbery is a regular occurrence. Alone, I could live with it, but with children it just isn’t worth it.
Judging from the sympathy for Michael Brown, a lot of people seem to think that strong-arm robbery isn’t a serious offense. “He was unarmed,” they say, as though that means he wasn’t a real threat. Bullshit. Just days before I left Seattle, several “unarmed” teens robbed an elderly woman in front of my local Safeway, knocking her to the ground and snatching her purse. Fortunately, she wasn’t badly hurt, but a broken hip or skull fracture can lead fairly directly to an old person’s death. And at 300 lbs., Michael Brown was as big as a bear — he wasn’t some skinny kid an average cop could handle with ease; more like an offensive lineman in the Big Ten who could knock a Division I linebacker on his ass. If a guy that size came at me, I’d say a prayer and unload as fast as I could, too.
Strong-arm robbery is just a stepping stone to the armed variety, which makes neighborhoods intolerable even for the young and healthy. At my local convenience store in Seattle, robbery was a fairly regular occurrence. Over the years, I made friends with the Korean store owners and workers, who were working class young men trying to bootstrap themselves into the American dream. They were responsible, hard-working and honest in their business. One day I stopped by and it happened that a robbery had occurred earlier in the day. There was a fresh bullet hole under the counter. The robber had fired his weapon either as a mistake or to make a point, but whatever the reason, it must have been terrifying for the poor guy working there.
Soon enough, the owner started having problems keeping employees. Nobody wanted to work where there were violent thugs coming in and menacing customers and cashiers.
The point is that robbery isn’t just a simple property crime, but a crime against the entire community. Not only is the store owner losing money; others are discouraged from opening businesses or shopping anywhere without an armed guard. People are afraid to walk down the street. Business insurance rates go through the roof. Trust is markedly lowered, and young black men are inevitably profiled. This last point bears repeating: when thugs like Michael Brown rob people, law-abiding young black men face the consequences in increased scrutiny and police attention, and that is an entirely natural and understandable reaction.
However, while I am far from pleased to see Reverend Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson stirring up trouble over the subsequent shooting incident, which has yet to be fully investigated, what I find truly inexcusable is the presence of a white billionaire amongst the protesters and looters. Jack Dorsey, cofounder of Twitter, has taken it upon himself to express solidarity with the crowd that is running around looting stores in the name of a dead violent criminal.
Jack Dorsey, who threw his friend, Twitter cofounder Noah Glass, under the bus while he was going through a painful divorce. Jack Dorsey, who lives in a ten million dollar house in an exclusive San Francisco neighborhood, and is worth almost $2 billion.
If Jack Dorsey hadn’t stumbled into Noah Glass’s operation and hit the jackpot, he’d be an ordinary Joe lucky to be able to afford to live in San Francisco at all.
So what does Jack Dorsey do with his great success and fortune? Why, he sides with the kind of people who smash the American dream with their fists. He expresses solidarity with those who would deny a humble shopkeeper the right to do business in peace. He is the epitome of the new elite/underclass coalition; a true child of San Francisco’s city-on-a-hill mentality.
If Dorsey were a middle-class programmer – which he would have been without Noah Glass’s connections – and he had gone back to his hometown of St. Louis to marry and have kids, guys like Michael Brown would have terrified him, and with good reason. The Michael Browns of the world are the people who walk up to smaller kids and demand their lunch money in elementary school, then later on their iphones. Fortunately for Jack Dorsey, he doesn’t have to worry about that. If he ever has any kids, he can send them to an elite San Francisco private school and afford the $40k+ yearly tuition without even noticing it.
Jack Dorsey will never have to work in a dangerous neighborhood where he faces the risk of robbery. He’ll never have to empty a safe while worrying that somebody will show up and steal a month’s worth of profit. And, of course, he’ll never have to face the prospect of getting shot in the face over the contents of a cash register.
If there’s anything more disgusting than an entire community rallying in support of one of the thugs who is actually wrecking their community and innocent people’s ability to make a living, it’s one of our billionaires descending from on high to offer political and moral – and most likely financial – support for this destruction of civil society.
It’s time we started asking ourselves who on earth these guys think they are.
