Holes in the Map

When I was a boy, sometimes my parents would load the family into our old green Rambler and we’d just go for a drive. I don’t know anybody who “goes for drives” anymore, but it was not uncommon in the 1970s. Blame us for global warming if you want to – I cannot bring myself to care. Most of Ohio was pretty safe back then. There were plenty of things to see – small adventures scattered across the sea of green or yellow corn. My job on such trips, more honorary than necessary, was to navigate our travels by the map. A map, if you happen to be too young to have ever seen a real one, was a huge sheet of paper printed colorfully with roads and points of interest marked by cryptic notes and tiny symbols. Pressing the tiny symbols with your finger did not connect you to anything. There were no web sites in those days. Telephones were solid and heavy devices, some wired securely to the wall at home. They linked to relatives rather than to computers.

You didn’t carry either the world’s wisdom or its idiotic opinions in your pocket. Your eyes and the sheet of paper were all you had to guide you on the road. If you wanted to know what was in Chillicothe, you had to drive to there to find out. There were, even then, a few holes in the map. Places the old green Rambler dared not go. We didn’t go to the worst parts of nearby cities. It wasn’t that we hated the people who lived there – we were simply realists. Poor neighborhoods are the homes of default for people who, for one reason or another, do not thrive in a modern civilized society. A small fraction of those people really are sociopathic predators. This is just a fact. Violent people without much impulse control just don’t end up in middle-class suburbs unless the government, in its official zeal for “fairness,” plants them there. Even today’s progressives know this, whether they admit it or not. They avoid the slums and ghettos that form substantial sections of all our cities just like everybody else who has a choice. Times change but human nature doesn’t. The internet has, to the extent to which the left controls it, hidden the inconvenient contradiction between reality and grand utopian narrative – but only if you stay in cyberspace. On the internet, yesterday’s hostile, crime-ridden slum can become today’s rich and vibrant haven of diversity – just as any imaginative loser can become a thriving entrepreneur, or any slobbering pervert can become a child’s new best friend. This is the magic of wishful thinking. It is the refuge of those who can dream the accepted dream, speak the accepted speech, and live some kind of nervous little life inside the accepted safe space of the well-cultivated neo-Marxist mind. There have always been costs to the buzzing, dizzying circus act that has passed itself off as human progress – but our wheels have somehow slipped entirely off the road this time. We are in new, uncharted territory. Though not exactly a tourist magnet, the northeastern part of Columbus, Ohio used to be an unpretentious, unremarkable part of America. You could go there if you wanted to. It is now an unofficial colony of Somalia. The business signs, grimy and grey for decades, are now in Arabic. Somali women, grown fat on an American diet doled out by the public’s confiscated largesse, waddle along the street in their abysmal burkas. Somali men are something other than Americans with funny accents. Something has gone badly wrong. While I can still drive through this part of Columbus, I notice the Americans who used to live there, white and black, are fewer and farther between. I notice when I hear on the local news that a “refugee” has run his car into a group of students at Ohio State, then chased others down the street with a knife while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” I notice when another “migrant,” a Muslim from Ghana, enters a restaurant owned by an Israeli and proceeds to hack at the customers with a machete. America’s earlier minorities didn’t do these things. This is something new. I may be in Ohio, my dear Toto, but something tells me I’m not in my own country anymore. I’m in the middle of a pre-industrial, semi-literate, dystopian Islamic theme park. Unlike Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I cannot simply tap my heels together and get back to the imperfect but largely harmless familiarity of home. One more part of America has been allocated to another alien population – squatters who have been brought here to feed on us and to drive us out. But where do we have left to go? This isn’t progress – though it is progressive. This situation did not occur by accident. It is the product of a premeditated and deliberate social policy. When immigration is talked about on what sneeringly masquerades as news, it is always painted in fatalistic phrases that make it sound like an unstoppable force of nature – as though the people surging into America were a swarm of Mexican butterflies or a herd of East African wildebeests that had somehow overwhelmed the TSA. This invasion is portrayed as if there were no plan involved at all – just some primal urge that arises spontaneously in third-worlders that can’t be stopped. This is the narrative fashioned for the convenience of the unaffected. That they might feel good about themselves while enjoying a little schadenfreude at our expense. They do not see the consequences. They see the dream. No one who actually lives here could possibly believe that back in the 1990s a group of impoverished Somali fishermen and goat herders woke up one morning and said to one another: “I hear there is good fishing in Alum Creek Lake, and abundant grazing in Sharon Woods Metro Park! Let’s hop a flight to Ohio and become Americans!” They did not aspire to be Americans in any remotely meaningful sense of the word. We have seen them, and we are not that stupid. The African populations seeded in Columbus, Minneapolis, and many other places did not come here to learn our culture or our values. They were not blown here in some unavoidable freak storm, nor did they wander here in search of missing livestock. They were certainly not brought here centuries ago as hapless and unwilling slaves. People from Washington, Boston, San Francisco and New York have sponsored this invasion – people who staff committees and think tanks, people who show the residents of the heartland the same loving concern that the Jackson administration showed the Cherokee. Call me a racist if you want to – I cannot bring myself to care. I saw the buried remains of displaced Indian nations as child. The basic lesson of what migrants do to native populations wasn’t lost on me. Graphic credit: Picserver