THE VIGILANTE RANT

I understand that overall crime rates are dropping slightly nation-wide and this, obviously, is good news. The fewer murders, rapes, robberies, muggings, etc., the better off and safer we’ll be. This, however, rather depends on where one lives, doesn’t it? I teach in a very large inner-city “ghetto” high school. Most of the students come from neighborhoods that can best be described as domestic third world shit-holes: no offense to all the third world shit-holes out there. Places like East New York are veritable cess pools of crime, violence, drugs, and gangs. Neighborhoods like Bushwick, however, make East New York look like a fucking country club suburb.

Crime in neighborhoods like these is not only rampant but random as well. One of my students, a harmless enough fellow named Rakeem Jones, was walking along Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn going shopping for his mom. As he turned a corner, he took two rounds in the chest and died instantly. It turns out that “they” weren’t even gunning for Rakeem. He simply walked into the middle of a gun-fight between rival gangs. Shaheem, another student of mine and a complete, utter piece of shit, was informed that he “played” too much and was executed in the middle of the street in broad daylight. “They” pumped six slugs into his chest and there were, of course, no witnesses. Yet another of my charges, whose name escapes me, was attending his uncle’s funeral who was gunned down in some gang related incident. “They” burst into the funeral parlor, opened fire, and hit the kid at least twice. He managed to make it to the street but the killers followed and finished the job. The young man’s sheet-shrouded body made the papers the following morning.

I caution my students, especially before vacations, to stay low and watch out for the stray bullets. Unfortunately, I’m only half-kidding. I further instruct them that when home at night with the lights on to make sure the blinds and curtains are drawn so they’ll make less of a target from the street! Again, only a partial jest. I calculated not too long ago that over the last quarter-century or so, roughly twenty to twenty-five students of mine have been killed while about six others themselves have become killers. Maybe I’d better change something about my methodology or perhaps I’ve got to adopt an alternative fucking modality!

This type of violence is not, obviously, endemic to New York City but rather has become systemic to all of America’s urban centers. Not one has managed to escape the scourge. If draconian measures are not quickly instituted, our nation will suffer the same fate as others that came before us: it will cease to exist. Our democratic, representative republic will have been transformed into something resembling medieval feudalism in Europe after Rome’s spectacular demise, only a thousand times worse. After all, the barbarians of yesteryear merely had spears, swords, and arrows. The present day Visigoths, however, tote nine millimeters, AK 47’s, and fucking MAC 10 machine pistols! The coming Dark Ages will make the last one seem like a trip to freaking Disney World where your biggest problem is coping with that gigantic fucking mouse!!

If the “problem” could be somehow limited to or contained in our urban centers, the country’s ruination might be avoided or at least post- poned. That, sadly, is not the case. The scum, in increasing numbers, has begun migrating – make that oozing - into the suburbs. The disease has thoroughly metastasized and we require nothing short of a societal equivalent of a radical mastectomy to make it right. Even then, it is probably too damned late! There was a time not all that many years ago, when the concept of “gated communities” did not exist. Not only were neighborhoods safe, especially in suburbia, but people did not live in constant fear. Home security consisted of a 12 gauge pump and a well-trained dog! Neighbors looked out for one another, children went unmolested, and drive-by shootings weren’t even a blip on the radar screen.

Less than a generation later, Home Security has grown into one of the largest industries in the country. Gated communities are so common that they don’t even warrant the raised eyebrow, and the “Rent-a-Cop” business has become a permanent fixture of American life. How could it all have gone so fucking wrong so fucking fast?!? Perhaps it is the fault of our law enforcement agencies. Maybe the cops are either not performing properly or they are so overwhelmed that they cannot function effectively. It is most probably the latter. In our free and open society, we value our privacy far more than our security-safety. Our law enforcement agencies are not designed to prevent crimes before they occur but rather to apprehend the criminal after the fact. To prevent crime would require a cop or perhaps a soldier on every corner carrying a weapon that could spit out about 750 rounds per minute. Think Red China under Mao or the old Soviet Union. While this might go a long way toward crime prevention, it would most certainly have debilitating ramifications for our democratic institutions and way of life. How about we declare marshal law, bring in the army to patrol our cities, and implement strict curfews with appallingly harsh treatment for violators? Sounds workable, but then there’s that pesky little issue of Posse Commitatus! Dammit, another great idea shot all to shit!!

The police are obviously overwhelmed. There are not nearly enough of them to deal efficaciously with the miscreants and marauders amongst us. Additionally, they are completely ham-strung by those fucking liberal “do-badders” out there who are more concerned with the rights of criminals than those of law-abiding citizens. Truthfully, Neanderthals like me don’t give a shit if some serial killer gets Mirandized or not and we certainly don’t give a flying fuck about that cretinous baboon who rapes and kills children because his mother wouldn’t let him masturbate as a child! If that rat bastard rots in central booking for a year without going before a judge, fine by me! You can take your Habeas Corpus and just stick it where the sun don’t shine!! Get my drift?

You cannot possibly imagine how many of us out here are thoroughly nauseated every damned time some malicious, venal piece of shit out on parole or probation continues raping, murdering, and generally preying on the innocent. Keep that mother-fucking monster, that excuse for a human being locked the fuck up!! I’ve read that almost 50% of all violent crimes committed in this country are the handy-work of some recidivist mutant who should be incarcerated and entertaining Bubba while awaiting trial. Instead the bastards are out there among us blithely destroying lives, neighborhoods, and entire communities. Since these vicious scumbags are amongst US, hurting US, and destroying US maybe it’s up to US to deal with THEM! When the law stops, people tend to take over. I give you the Los Angeles riots of years past when Korean shop-keepers used both long and short guns to protect life and family.

I give you Brian, an old student of mine. He described a gun-fight he had been in when he and some doper were trying to put holes in each other. My first reaction was Bullshit! I’m going to believe some sixteen year-old kid with a story like that! It turned out that the story was 100% accurate. A drug dealer had been persistently attempting to introduce his two younger sisters to the delights of crack cocaine. Brian objected and informed the dealer that if he didn’t stop bothering the girls he’d be killed. Brian further suggested that the budding young entrepreneur move his operation to another part of town. In other words, get the fuck out of Dodge and head for the tall grass! The businessman refused to heed the warning and true to his word, my former student got his gun and started shooting. According to Brian, while he didn’t actually kill the son of a bitch it wasn’t for a lack of trying. In the exchange of gunfire, the drug dealer was badly wounded and was never seen in the neighborhood again. You got a problem with that?!?

Another kid related the story of the stalker who had been following his mother around the neighborhood for at least a month. He taunted her with sexual innuendo and built up to graphic descriptions of what he’d like to do to her. The family went to the police and got no satisfaction. They had a judge issue a restraining order: still no remedy. In the end, the kid, his father, and a bunch of relatives finally paid the pervert a visit. When asked what happened, the young fellow just smiled and said that the stalker wouldn’t be bothering his mom anymore, or anyone else for that matter. You know if I had to bet, I’d say that the miscreant’s 5th and 14th Amendment rights were completely violated. His 1st, 6th, and 8th Amendment rights were also probably brutally trampled on (sorry folks, you look ‘em up). You know what? I’m absolutely fine with that. You want to know why? Okay, I’ll tell ya. Mom’s okay, hasn’t been harmed, and is no longer being intimidated and frightened by some useless piece of shit criminal pervert! In addition, a message was sent out: don’t mess with this kid’s family! Fuck that bastard, fuck his rights, and fuck anyone who doesn’t understand that!!

Remember those Koreans from L.A.? They didn’t wait until their businesses had been looted and burned to the ground. They didn’t wait to see a life time of hard work go up in smoke. In the absence of any meaningful response from the authorities, they broke out the firepower and protected their lives, families, and property the only way they could. I’d love to have them as neighbors. The students referred to above deserve medals and kudos from their community: perhaps symbolic keys to the city would be appropriate. They both recognized an absolute and immediate need to protect members of their families: waiting was simply not an option. Brian couldn’t just wait until his sisters became crack addicts and whores and the other kid couldn’t wait until Mom had been brutally raped or worse! I applaud both of them for protecting their families while at the same time making their neighborhoods just slightly safer.

These and other examples of direct, if drastic, community action qualify as bona fide instances of true vigilantism. Now there’s a concept worth thinking about. We normally associate vigilantes with the old, lawless wild West before civilization and settlement: before peace officers, judges, and jails. These were times and places where there was literally no law and no one to enforce it. Those conditions necessitated private citizens banding together for the common good. As civilization spread west and legal systems were established, the need for vigilante justice, it was assumed, would diminish and then disappear. This sounds logical, reasonable, and rational. Civilization breeds civility, or so I’m told. With civility comes law-abiding citizens who rarely go out of their way to harm fellow citizens. The few miscreants who remain uncivilized can then be dealt with by the powers that be.

This rationale looks and sounds great on a theoretical basis. It holds up very well until you end up in the fabled “Hood” living in the projects, tenements, and slums. These shit-holes are so crime and drug infested that life is virtually guaranteed to be nasty, brutish, and short (to coin a phrase) for the average law-abiding shlub simply trying to eke out a living and stay alive from day to day. Not long ago, for example, residents of the “Pink Houses”, a particularly vicious example of government largesse, were forced to pay weekly in order to safely leave or enter their homes. Both the exit and reentry “fee” stood at fifty dollars per week. God help you if you wouldn’t or couldn’t pay because no one, including the police, acted as effective deterrents. Then there are the stories of residents of these failed shrines to the welfare state thrown out of their homes by gangs who turn the abodes into drug labs. Once again, the cops are impotent and the lives of residents are a living Hell.

What are the denizens of the Pink Houses and similar neighborhoods to do? One version of Webster’s maintains that a vigilante is “one of a group of self-appointed citizens acting to maintain order.” Yet another version notes that a vigilante is “a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily as when the processes of law seem inadequate.” To put it very succinctly, a vigilante is “A self-appointed doer of justice.” How about that, 21st century vigilantes? Does the concept make sense anymore or have we as a society become too soft, weak, squeamish, and gutless? This country, once renowned for its problem-solving acumen, has become a nation of whiners, complainers, whimperers, and feckless freeloaders! We seem to have lost all sense of self reliance and independence but rather have become virtually dependent on government for even such elemental needs as protecting our lives and those of our loved ones.

The government seemingly can’t protect us and, with a few notable exceptions, we refuse to protect ourselves! When individuals in a free society have lost the will, the guts if you prefer, to protect themselves and their property from the absolute pond scum bent on destroying us then I’d have to conclude that this nation’s survival is in very grave doubt. The barbarians are not merely at the gates, but rather inside and the havoc they wreak will lead to the death of this country. We seem to be suffering from a form of collective cowardice. Our survival instincts have become so dulled, so atrophied, as to be virtually nonexistent. This has to be a form of societal mental illness. When the populace loses its will to fight back and instead relies on government agencies for its very existence, then the end is surely near!

Yes, I am thoroughly endorsing not only the concept of vigilantism but its practice as well. I find nothing the least bit troubling about decent people intimidating, hurting, and even killing the human vermin who intimidate, hurt, and kill those who are merely trying to get by the best way they can. Just the idea of armed groups of citizens – with enough firepower to completely route the enemy – makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Our inner cities have been over run by filth in human guise. They have been unopposed for so long that they appear invincible. Let decent folks fight back with equal or greater force and viciousness and the gang-bangers, drug dealers, rapists, killers, and other miscreants will eventually get the message and move on. Kill enough of them, and the neighborhood becomes safe. Once safety is assured, prosperity has a chance to take hold – but not until. Without a sense of security, no neighborhood can improve let alone prosper.

In the absence of effective authority, citizens have no choice but to take matters into their own hands. Will it be dangerous? You bet! Will people bleed and die? Absolutely! For those of you of the Liberal persuasion who shout back that violence is never the answer, Fuck Off! Sometimes violence is the only answer!! For all of you Left Wing Losers who feel that people need Big Government to solve their problems, grow a set of Balls! If given the opportunity, most average folks can overcome any and all adversity if the government would just step back and get the fuck out of the way! For those of you who are about to start calling me names like Conservative Asshole or Right Wing Nut Case, let’s try an experiment. Choose any major American city and I’ll pay your rent for one year in the “project” of your choice. Within a month you hypocritical bastards will be screaming for a gun for self-protection! Hell, you’ll probably demand an arsenal and will absolutely be at the very head of the line to sign up for vigilante duty! Good Hunting!!

Much “Luv” Y’all and Have a Great Day!

The Fifth Horseman