(Little) Things Fall Apart

Rudy Giuliani is widely credited for turning around New York City, taking it from a crime-ridden mess to a relatively safe city. He did this by concentrating on the small things. His police were instructed to stop the minor, "gateway" crimes as well as to hammer hard at the bigger offenders.

My wife and I visited New York City not long before 9/11 and were able to walk from our hotel to see Les Misérables with no problem. The last time I had been in New York City, in the mid-1970s, Times Square was a combat zone. Rudy made a huge difference to that city. Now, however, the city is beginning to slide back.

Does it feel some days as if New York– wealthy, successful, seemingly at the top of the world — is slipping back into the bad old days of crime, noise, dirt, rudeness? Like pentimento rising from an old canvas, the traces of New York's previous misery are appearing on the streets and in the subways — graffiti, aggressive panhandling, open drug dealing, filthy public areas, ear–splitting noise, screeching sirens, a sense of disorder we thought was gone. It's not "Soylent Green" again, but the old Hollywood sense of lawless New York is rearing its ugly head.

Worse, something menacing seems to be happening with violent crime. The newspapers have been filled recently with stories about horribly vicious cases — the trial, for example, that ended last week in a 44–count guilty verdict against the man accused of the brutal rape and torture of a Columbia University student living in Hamilton Heights, a seemingly safe neighborhood.

The new mayor, Michael Bloomberg is very, very concerned with trans fats and the harvesting of organs. Crime? Not so much, it would seem. Quality of life for the taxpaying citizens? Very little. I'd urge you to read the entire article I linked, because the slide is definitely there and it appears to be accelerating rapidly. The author of the article tries mightily to praise Bloomberg but it is obvious that there is something very, very wrong happening in the Big Apple.

Counting Costs

The damage that has been done by flooding in the Midwest is only beginning to be assessed. But damages will certainly run into the billions.

WINFIELD, Mo. - Farmhouses appear to float on lakes, and farmers use boats to get to their barns. Businesses are shuttered as flooded roadways cut off customers. Rail lines, factories, river locks are shut down. Homeowners, who watched and waited and prayed, have seen dreams drowned.

After weeks of flooding through Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Indiana and Wisconsin, billions of dollars in damage are adding up from dozens of flooded towns, shaky bridges, overwhelmed utilities, and thousands of evacuees.

But the misery index from the Great Flood of 2008 has only started to sink in.

The real damage will be done in future months as food prices soar. Where I live there are still cornfields completely underwater - there will be no crops from those fields. Many others that did not flood outright look wrong. The leaves on the corn is yellow, not the deep green it should be and the plants are only inches high - far too small for this time of year. Yields from those fields will be greatly reduced.