Remember when America’s great cities were great? San Francisco, New York, Chicago and other major cities were centers of art, culture, wealth, sophistication, and shopping.

Now, the cities are overrun with vagrants. Liberal judges decided that people have a Constitutional right (see, Martin v. Boise) to camp on the sidewalks and poop in the gutter, because stopping them from doing so constitutes cruel and unusual punishment for violating the laws that prohibit them from doing so.

Crimes such as shoplifting have been de-criminalized. The outcomes are predictable to anyone but a liberal: This new retail mode where payment is optional has produced more cases where people choose not to; Store owners, from small family-owned hardware stores to Walmart, are leaving the cities because they can’t make money if they can’t charge for their goods; liberals are shrieking “racists!”

Laws against dangerous drugs have been relaxed. The result is more dangerous drugs and drug addicts. Duh.

Then there are the illegal aliens. Lots of them. Tens of millions of them. The liberals who preside over the cities virtuously signaled that these illegal aliens are welcome in their cities. To their surprise, the illegal aliens took them seriously, and took their cities by storm.

The governor of Texas took them seriously too. When the illegal aliens grew from a trickle to a flood across the Mexican border, to the point that small towns in Texas could not possibly manage the numbers in a manner that was safe for either the aliens or the Texans, he shipped those who were willing to those northern cities that had announced that they were welcome.

For that, he was of course called “racist.”

With all this virtue-signaling going on, Joe Biden naturally wanted his share. He reversed the successful stay-in-Mexico policy that required prospective immigrants seeking asylum to stay in Mexico or their home country while their requests were processed – because that policy had been initiated by a man who was maniacal about making America great again named Donald Trump. Biden also stopped construction of the border wall and sold off the materials in stock awaiting use on the wall. Because MAGA-maniacal Trump.

In 2028 when Trump is in his final year of office, I hope he opens the border wide, just so that his Democrat replacements will cry “racism!” and close it more securely than their uptight sphincters.

Biden and his purported Homeland Security Chief who is purportedly in charge of border security tell us with a straight face that this border across which millions of people come illegally is “secure” and there is “no crisis” and it’s all the Republicans’ fault anyway.

When Republicans point out that this problem was much less severe under the MAGA-Republican maniac, Democrats shout “racists!”

Speaking of Republicans, they’ve recently agreed to a deal with Democrats to use more taxpayer money to pay people who can’t afford to care for children and are too stupid to figure out The Pill, the rhythm method, condoms, IUDs, abstinence, sterilization, or the word “no” or even the words “I have a headache” to . . . have children.

These are people who should be fined for having children. Instead, the government is fining the rest of us for them having children, and giving the fine money to them. Now that’s cruel and unusual.

Republicans foolishly think that fining the rest of us for the wrongs committed by these child-bearers (“parents” might be too strong a word) will make the child-bearers vote for them. It won’t, and it’s almost enough to make me vote against them.

What’s the future for such children borne by these child-bearers? They will go to public schools, when they feel like it, and be taught that America is an evil place where their mother was wrongly denied an abortion because she couldn’t figure out how to drive a couple hours across the state line.

Eventually, they’ll graduate from high school with 5^th grade reading skills and permanent Adderall and pot-induced psychosis. Prestige colleges that used to be good will admit them, because the colleges don’t require the SAT test anymore because the SAT was lethal evidence that the colleges were discriminating against white and Asian applicants.

Colleges have figured out that the way to end the problem of racial discrimination is not to stop discriminating on the basis of race, but to bury the evidence of it.

Armed with that worthless degree from a college that never should have admitted them, and now with reading skills all the way up to the 7^th grade level, these drug-addled children will get jobs as aerospace engineers designing 737s for DEI-conscious Boeing.

Which is perfect for me. Because I personally am about ready to bail out through the gaping hole left by that expelled fuselage door of what use to be called our culture. The plane is crashing anyway.

In one of Beaton’s prior lives, and one of Boeing’s prior lives, Beaton was an aerospace engineer for Boeing.