Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Fieger, Foolishness, and Families


           Jeffrey Fieger thinks that Detroit’s problems are financial at the root and that they’ll be solved by money.  He thinks that the way to get money is through legalized prostitution, legalized drugs, and legalized gambling. 
He doesn’t know that a city’s liveability is determined by the moral fiber of its citizens and by the civic wisdom of its leaders, not by cash.  If you give money to a fool, to an addict, or to a profligate, the money disappears in an instant.  Fieger’s plan is a magnet for fools, not for families.  He doesn’t know that, because most of our problems are rooted in human nature, most of the challenges that confront us simply have no political solution.  Politics won’t fix human nature, though politics can undermine it.  If you want to undermine human nature and exacerbate our problems, Jeffrey Fieger is just the man for the job.
Fieger is the man best suited to produce further social destruction in Detroit because he does not know what we’ve known for centuries and centuries since the days of Aristotle’s Politics:  The fundamental building block of a society is the traditional family, not the whorehouse, the drug den, or the casino.  Whatever aids, supports, or defends the traditional family also aids, supports and defends society.  What does not, undermines it.  If a society is undermined long enough or fully enough, it collapses.  We are witnessing that ugly and disturbing slow-motion collapse daily in Detroit, and have been since the 1960s, when the government tried to make it a “model city.”
Nearly 50 years of uninterrupted Democratic rule and ill-conceived governmental machinations in Detroit have not produced a model city.   Quite the contrary:  It produced urban blight on the grandest scale the nation, maybe even the world, has ever seen.  But no matter how disastrous their policies, the Detroit blighters keep getting re-elected.  Fieger’s misbegotten policies are just the latest in a long series of foolish notions that unravel the very fabric of the community, namely the traditional family.  What does not build families does not build cities.  What injures the one injures the other.  If you're looking to vice to find civic redemption, you will look forever.  
Fieger has forgotten, if he ever knew, that we are always one generation from barbarism.  He’s forgotten that we are not born civilized, but must acquire civility some time later, if at all.  He’s forgotten that civility is best acquired in a traditional home and in a church, and not from the slot machines, drug dealers and prostitutes he currently pimps.  They are the breeding ground of moral and financial servitude; they are the enemy of the families and churches that alone will save us -- not the garden of freedom, prosperity, and productivity, or of the personal virtues from which they spring.
Gambling, prostitution, and drugs will not fix Detroit’s problems.  But they will make those problems worse, much worse, something Jeffrey Fieger’s shrunken imagination and under-informed proposals cannot fathom.  He says he can fix what’s wrong with Detroit “in five minutes.”  He thinks Detroit can’t get any worse.  He’s wrong on both counts, completely wrong.   It’s an ignorance and arrogance that makes the blood run cold -- and in the streets.  Violence, not peace, is the historic companion of vice.
Because you can’t build families on gambling, whoring and drugs, Fieger’s proposal is a frontal assault on families.  It is, therefore, a frontal assault on Detroit, or what remains of it, now that businesses and families have fled, and now that home after home, on block after block, in neighborhood after neighborhood have been reduced to empty, uninhabitable shells, where crime is prolific and where schools and education have fallen into nearly unfixable disarray and disrepair.  Some parts of the city could not be worse off if the city leaders had tried for years to turn them into a real-life stage-set for the next epic movie about the apocalypse, of which Fieger’s most recent public policy death wish is the latest embodiment.
It’s not the first time Jeffrey Fieger has been associated with killing off the sick and dying.

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