listen. There’s a whole mentality shift that needs to happen culture wide here, from the schools to the public infrastructure to pet ownership to the justice system
The proper response to your dog doing a natural behavior you dislike (digging/barking/protecting etc) it to give them an appropriate time and place to engage in that behavior
The proper response to skateboarders damaging infrastructure is to build more and better skate parks, or build skate elements into the public infrastructure on purpose.
The proper response to homeless people sleeping on park benches is to build them houses.
you see how there’s like, a commonality at play here?
The proper response to a disruption is to address the root of the disruption directly, not somehow attack the disruption itself -
you don’t invent a muffler by swinging a bat at the engine noise, you don’t relieve your hunger by punching yourself in the stomach, you don’t resolve public unrest by sending armed men to control them and you don’t prevent homeless people using bus shelters as a roof by removing the bus shelters.
a whole ass shift in a basic mindset, i’m tellin’ you. We need it.
Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.
What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.
