If you’re going to shoot, shoot. And if you’re going to save homeless people from freezing to death, then save them and don’t dance around them.
This common-sense thinking seems to be eluding uber-progressive Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the new leader of New York City. Right now, New York is experiencing frighteningly cold weather, which is a challenge to all and a threat to many. In fact, as many as 17 people have died due to the subzero conditions.
No group is more at risk from the cold, of course, than the homeless. But just as they face the worst of the elements, the response to their situation is overcome with political correctness and virtue-signaling.
In a public service announcement that could have been featured on The Babylon Bee (motto: “Fake news you can trust”), Mamdani extols all the resources that are being presented to protect New Yorkers: armies of social workers, warm buses, warm shelters, hotel rooms, access to an emergency number 24/7.
All of this is noble, but when it comes to the most vulnerable group—the homeless—it is largely beside the point. That is because, almost by definition, these are the last people who will avail themselves of any help, assistance, suggestion or guidance.
All the resources in the world are worthless and pointless if the intended recipients of them have no interest in partaking.
In what has to stand as a monument to progressive wrong-headedness and sanctimonious incompetence, Mamdani’s administration ordered police and sanitation workers not to tear down homeless encampments just before the Arctic-level deep freeze that hit New York.
Instead, the Department of Homeless Services was to be charged with the issue of what to do, if anything, with these encampments.
This decision represents a change from previous mayoralties, including that of Bill de Blasio, the progressive opening act to Mamdani, who relied on the New York City Police Department to make sure that the homeless would not strand themselves in life-threatening tents or cardboard encampments. Rather they would be taken, happily or otherwise, to shelters.
Of course, this runs afoul of the woke sensibility that accords total discretion to the homeless, and that inherently regards police involvement as abusive and mistrustful.
As an example of the classic New York mantra of “you can’t make this up,” the order to desist from sweeping and dismantling homeless encampments was made in December, just weeks before the fatal cold arrived.
Now, instead of tough love removal from the very real likelihood of death come coaching, suggesting and nonthreatening appeals to the homeless to move from their perilous places.
As one volunteer related, as quoted in The Guardian, “You’ve got to have patience. You have to see them more than once, more than twice. It might even take 10 times for them even to acknowledge you.”
This all sounds noble, except that there are consequences to waiting. When temperatures hit zero, lives are at risk, and the issue becomes the priority of saving a life or dancing around the prospective victim so as to honor the integrity of his homelessness.
Why is it that previous mayors, de Blasio included, had no difficulty with prioritizing the saving of lives due to dangerous weather? There is also the uncomfortable recognition that, in many cases, the people of concern might not even be capable of knowing consent.
Of course, to the woke progressive, this is unacceptable: No one should be forced to do anything, especially one who finds himself in the tableau of victimhood.
The great irony here is that Mamdani— for whom every Israeli is a murderer of innocent Palestinians—is willing to be a party to negligent homicide in the name of honoring the idea of “respecting” the homeless by defanging the police.
If this were Gaza, the mayor would be shouting “genocide” as the Israelis refrained from saving Palestinian Arabs freezing in the Strip. But there is no Jewish angle to the story of freezing New Yorkers in dire straits.
And to the progressive acolyte who now calls the shots in New York, the homeless need to be treated with kid gloves, even if it kills them.
