Timothy Birdnow

When I was growing up I lived in a suburb that shared a border with the City of St. Louis. Many of the people in my neighborhood had fled an area called Walnut Park because of rising crime. One friend's family left after his sister - then a small girl - got beaten up for no good reason. Walnut Park because a cesspool of crime and decay and it now looks like a bombed out neighborhood in some Third World hellhole.

My old neighborhood has not gotten THAT bad yet but it started really going down when a shopping mall just two blocks away because a major bus hub. Suddenly the people who destroyed Walnut Park could come to our neighborhood easily and wreck havoc on a bunch of new pigeons.

My grandparents - who lived across the street from us - were mugged several times and that right in front of their own home as they were followed. Lots of such crimes occurred.

That neighborhood emptied out fast and the real bad guys moved on to greener pastures before the neighborhood became a total cesspool.

But that doesn't mean it's not bad; my late father was coming home from the pharmacy just a couple of blocks away and was between two cars in a shootout. He didn't get hurt but he sure could have.

The point is this is what liberal programs wrought; the source of infection was the City of St. Louis, which the Democrats have owned forever, or nearly so. (The last Republican mayor left office in 1948 and I don't believe a single Republican has held any kind of office since then. Republicans run but spend zero money and run just anybody who volunteers. The volunteers just want to put on their resume' they were candidates for mayor in a major metropolitan area; they have no interest in actually winning.) St. Louis did exactly what these Baltimore suburbanites are suffering now.

Is it any wonder St. Louis had the massive explosion known as Ferguson? While Ferguson was mostly triggered by crime from refugees from the historically black Kinloch (which the CITY largely tore down to build new runways for the city-owned Lambert Field airport) the fact is it has been city policy for decades to move black people, and especially the poor black folks, north while they used to shield themselves in their German and Irish and Italian enclaves on the south side. The white people in St. Louis all voted Democrat because their labor unions told them to and they were protected from the crime that festered in the ghettos to the north.

That's not the case anymore and St. Louis keeps shrinking as people from all races seek to find safety. South St. Louis is now entirely mixed race, with some traditionally white areas like Dutchtown being ghetto to the core. St. Louis is dying and there are now increasing calls for the city to merge with St. Louis County. St. Louis seceded from St. Louis County in the late nineteenth century to avoid carrying the tax burden for farm communities and Kinloch. Now they want back in because they have run off the tax base.

Whether the anschluss happens or not is immaterial at this point; St. Louis County now resembles in no small part the city twenty years ago and is following the same trajectory. I suppose the whole STL county will then try to merge with St. Charles county and start the process over again.

Liberalism doesn't create or preserve - it destroys one way or another. It's like a plague of locusts, consume everything then move on.

So what is happening in Baltimore makes perfect sense to me. I lived through it here in "the 'Lou".

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