Human Events: Mayor Bowser broke her contract with residents like me. So we’re leaving.
By Daniel Turner
During the last night in my condo in DC, I had to walk my dog an extra lap around the block because a crazy person was outside screaming obscenities. I wasn’t afraid. I just didn’t feel like getting into it with him or having to listen to his story—his “Let me just tell you something,” attempt to get money from me. It was 1 A.M., and I was tired from a night out—but more so, just tired in general. Tired of it all.
I’m a city kid, through and through. And not a recent one. Not some Nebraska transplant who moved to the city and immediately thinks of himself as a local. A woman tried that on me once. With her affected upspeak cadence, where declarations sound like interrogatories, she told me she was from “Brook-LAN?” “No, you’re not,” I retorted (obnoxiously, being the 6th generation New Yorker that I am). “You LIVE in Brooklyn. People who are really from there don’t pronounce it like that.”
My uncle Bob, the family historian (and former Congressman representing our neighborhood from Queens) traces our family in Manhattan since the 1840’s. Between my Irish dad, from the Irish part of Manhattan, and my Italian Mom, from the Italian part of Brooklyn, we have family or friends in practically every part of the city. New York is not just where we live; it’s like a family member, as loved as offspring, as revered as a grandparent, as formative as a mom and dad.
I left that family member in 2003, when I moved to Washington, DC for work. It’s not New York, but it’s still the city, and, for the past 17 years, it’s been an exciting time to call it home. I’ve witnessed the birth of entire neighborhoods: Shaw, 14th Street, The Atlas District, Navy Yard, Ivy City, The Wharf. Parts of DC you couldn’t even drive through at one point now had Michelin Star dining and outdoor beer gardens. From abandoned streets with burnt-out buildings—many still bearing the scorched marks from the fires of the ‘68 riots—multi-million-dollar row houses were restored, new condos arose, and wine bars and gyms multiplied like Abraham’s offspring.
We put up with a lot in order to live in the city: lousy transportation, noise, traffic, pollution, and our fair share of homeless people. It’s all just a part of living in urban America. But I’ll gladly tolerate sirens and car horns in exchange for a new restaurant on the corner. For major league sports, performing arts, museums, and bars, I will put up with the occasional crazy guy on the street, metro derailment, or gridlocked traffic because an intersection is blocked by some group “raising awareness” about something or other. That’s just the price of the urban lifestyle, and as a life-long city dweller, I knew what I was paying for—and with what.
I did my part, too. My role in the fabric of urban society, overlooked but essential, was to spend my money. Eat, drink, shop, spend, tip, pay. And man, did I pay: taxes, rents, then a mortgage and HOA fees. I paid taxes on things the government deemed “bad” for me, like alcohol and cigarettes; taxes on services which organized labor deemed “bad” for them, like rideshare. I paid gas tax, cable tax, cell phone tax, and, of course, income tax. Lots of income tax.
All I asked in return was relative safety and to be left alone to enjoy the city. City-living in America, for decades, meant tolerating mild inconveniences so that you could be left alone, alongside millions of others. That was the tacit pact.
And DC broke it. MORE HERE
h/t Llama Disco
Beautifully written article. However, voter registration id should be required ( before moving), to keep liberals in the bed they made. The bed of whores, and fleas.
democRAT controlled cities are in a death-spiral. The more they control, the more good people pick up and leave… and it’s no accident. democRATs get solid voting block by forcing out the good people while forcing their army of locusts out to the suburbs for scavenging.
My tie to Washington. It has been going down for a long time.
https://theconservativekitchentable.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-house-on-8th-street.html#comment-form
I often what happened to my friend from the neighborhood.
Big cities are going to die. Who would want to live in them now.
But the money these cities spend will continue. With a much reduced tax base.
Enter federal gov’t and federal reserve. Those two entities will throw hundreds of billions, if not trillions, at the cities.
Buy gold.
Keep moving past Virginia. We have more than our share ‘of good liberal’ refugees. Talk about oxymoronic phrases.
Leftists destroy where they live, then abandon their shit holes in favor of normal places. But they bring their stupid ideology with them. And destroy where we live.
I simply can’t stand it. Stay where you are and fix it
We’re fully booked.
The writer convinced me that he loves urban living but one can only tolerate so much lunacy before planning to escape.
For years now my wife and I have dreamed of owning our own home here in NH…. away from ANY city since the “live free or die” state has just as many lunatics in their cities as everywhere else and living in the slums like the guy in this article has lost its appeal (lol) to both of us.
Upstate NH is beautiful, isolated, and everything you could want from small-town communities, and the further up into the White Mountains you go the more rustic and the further apart are neighbors who like the guy above, just want to be left alone.
What we have noticed is the drastic change in available houses for sale over the last few months. Zillow used to have hundreds of listings for new and used homes in all different flavors, price ranges, and categories like amount of land, amenities, and age of the house mean nothing anymore.
Just last week when my wife looked they had SIX, count them SIX listings available for THE ENTIRE STATE!!!
All the richy-riches that have the cheddar to blow have bought up property like it is going out of style for their very own bug-out shelter and a lot of them are not even living in them! The ones we are seeing now on zillow are homes just renovated and asking HUGE sums of money just to RENT them!!!
After talking to others we have found that just about anyone who has the money has jumped on the buy-property-band-wagon. The silver lining is that these city-people do NOT understand what it is like living in the sticks or what it is like to endure a NH winter…. and the higher you go in elevation the stronger, longer, and more brutal the winters last along with power outages, poorly plowed & maintained roads (if at all) and the abundance of wildlife that can kill you for being stupid.
It makes a lot of them last just ONE winter before they are ready to sell and move back to their comfy city life…lol except now there is no more comfy city life.
Prescriptions for anti-depressants are set to sky-rocket in the near future so invest now!!!!
Outstanding and reflects on ALL democRAT run Urban Shitholes in our country!
I lived and worked in the DC area for 12 years. Mostly Prince George Co MD. & SE DC. I would not live in DC ever! I stayed just outside the beltway for a while in Laurel and then Waldorf. In those days the beltway was more or less a demarcation line putting the criminals on one side and the ‘normals’ on the other. When I got married and we wanted a child, I talked to my wife and told her we have to move. I would not agree to expose my daughter to the cultural rot that I saw 20 years ago.
I even hated driving in DC with all the one-way streets, convoluted no parking zones, cameras, bike zones, multiple pedestrian crossings in one block. It was a victory of sorts just to get out of there without a ticket.
From reading the comments in a Montana group on FB-the same thing is happening there. Everyone is freaked out that the newbies are going to vote the same way they did in their home state. The locals are praying for a harsh winter to drive out the carpetbaggers and to bring the home/land prices back down to a reasonable range.
So many posts on that site start like, “I’m moving Montana, what are the the top 5 things I should know…” that the Admins just banned the “moving” topic entirely.
😢
I don’t mind putting up with all of the impoverished and trapped blacks here because they are Angus….
Read the article. That guy is one pretentious loser. Tea at the hotel? Really? Fundraisers,? New oyster bar justifies putting up with all that BS for years. Man I wouldn’t want to be living with a bunch of pretentious losers like that guy. I feel sorry for his new neighbors
Representative of most greying former yuppies who are finding that remaining in the socialist urbs they helped to “venezuela” isn’t fun anymore and will now flee; swarming like locusts, spreading their nasty political disease wherever they land.
PHenery has it right…..
To rephrase with my own wording;
Your ‘utopia’ failed….learn from it.
DO NOT come to my fiefdom and try to recreate your already failed utopia.
You have already proved that you’ve failed……FOAD.
Not to be rude, but I’m sorry we really don’t like city folks leaving the city to come out and let their dogs run in our woods or our streams and especially not after our livestock. We don’t like you riding your bike down the middle of our country roads like you own them. We don’t like you complaining about our dirt gravel roads and wanting us to pay more taxes to pave all the roads because they get your little plastic car dirty. We don’t like to hear you complain that people are always firing guns. We don’t like you trying to get the farm ran out that you moved in next to because you don’t like to smell shit.
You see we want to be just left alone too. We like things just way they are, we like our farms, we like our dirt gravel roads, we like our trucks driving down our county roads without having to follow an idiot on a bicycle, we don’t like your dog chasing our animals or killing our animals and we like to shoot our guns sometimes just for the hell of it and we don’t want a gourmet coffee shop on the corner and most of all we don’t want democrats in office or more taxes. So if you can truly just leave us alone and not be trying to turn us into the cesspool you escaped, you’re more than welcome, but if not then please stay where you’re at and fix your own shit, don’t be coming in and trying to tear our shit up.
To the writer of this piece: good luck with that, and don’t move here to flyover country. You were part of the problem.
Yes, you had your good life in DC. Sure, come inconveniences, but overall a good job, the financial ability to inhabit nice restaurants and bars, modern conveniences like swanky gyms, nice apartment, etc. etc. But did you bother to pay attention to what was going on? Did you bother to complain about Bowser, or did you vote for her so you could virtue signal? You wanted to be left alone in your nice neighborhood with your good life, and so long as the seedy side of DC stayed away it was all good.
Look, I’m no modern day liberal, and in fact am probably the opposite of a liberal. I also do not resent people who are successful; good for you, you earned it and you should enjoy it. But I am also a strong believer in equality of opportunity for all people, and your city, state or nation cannot prosper until just and fair laws are enacted and uniformly enforced. All streets – not just yours – should be safe. Criminals should be punished. And elected officials – most notably the Democrat mayors of large cities – cannot pick and choose what laws they will enforce, cannot govern by dictate, cannot favor one group over another, and should be accountable to everyone. Obama famously remarked that he had a phone and a pen – I think this mindset automatically disqualified Obama for office because he had no regard to existing law. This disregard to the law is what I am seeing by too many public officials in too many places.
You want to abandon a city which was ultimately created by you and numerous others who were living a good life and avoided the crappy part of town rather than demand that law and order be evenly applied so everyone could have equal opportunity. You didn’t have kids in schools, and had no idea the fucked up ideas being taught by socialist teachers or the lack of usable education by our education bureaucracy. The guy shitting on the sidewalk outside your apartment building needs mental help, not just relocation to another part of town. Junkies need either rehab or incarceration, and nothing pisses me off more than a weekend coke-head who complains about this country’s drug problems while paying big bucks to a dealer for a weekend party. I could go on, but I’m reaching my pixel limit.
You, me, and a whole lot of other people are ultimately responsible for this mess because we ignored it or did not want to be inconvenienced by actually holding public officials accountable. Bowser, DeBlasio, Lightfoot, the people running Seattle, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Portland and a whole lot of other places are crazy assholes, and they have no business in government. But hey, as long as these idiots don’t affect my lifestyle, why should I care? You should care because you are now living a Hotel California life – you can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave.
Rant done.
Bravo Wyatt, Bravo
Democrat plan to take over suburbs. Mark Levin today.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/06/joe-bidens-plan-to-abolish-the-suburbs.php
https://dailycaller.com/2019/12/23/virginia-house-zoning-environment/
https://prairiepundit.blogspot.com/2020/07/democrats-desire-to-abolish-american.html
Hey Daniel
“I’m a city kid, through and through. And not a recent one. Not some Nebraska transplant who moved to the city and immediately thinks of himself as a local.”
Well, I’m a country kid, through and through. And not a recent one. Not some New York or DC transplant who moved to the country and immediately thinks of himself as a local.
You and your kind fucked up your own cities. We don’t need you, and even more so we don’t want you. You don’t share our values and you will not fit in. So you will try to change us to make you feel welcome.
Well, go fuck yourself Daniel, we aren’t changing for you, and you should keep your liberal voting where it belongs, not move on and wreck a third city.
You are an entitled piece of shit.
Too dang many Chicagoens moving to IN. Stay out. You are not wanted.
Up here in North Maine, we don’t call them “Transplants”.
We call them “Implants”.
They’re always fake and act like big boobs.