Crime Rate Per 1000 Residents, With Each Bar Representing 4 Residents
Portland, OR
San Francisco, CA
Glendale, AZ
Naperville, IL
places that consciously respect tradi- tion, family, faith, entrepreneurship, fiscal responsibility, and lower taxes? Do they fare any better? Data is the touchstone, a way of measuring. Naperville, an interior data point, is led by a Republican mayor and has less crime than 83 percent of the country, with crime hitting four in 1,000 residents. By contrast, in Port- land, led by a “progressive,” crime hits 66 in 1,000. Republican-led Glendale, Arizona, sees five crimes per 1,000, while “progressive” San Francisco sees 54 per 1,000. Go then to economic data. Naper- ville’s poverty rate is 3.77 percent — versus San Francisco’s 25 percent and Portland’s 12.2 percent. Portland also has the second-highest number of homeless families in America. Meantime, Glendale’s poverty rate,
Perhaps Dickens’s famous first sentence fits our times as easily as his. He wrote: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of fool- ishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period [ . . . ].” The time of which he wrote was like his — and shudderingly, like ours. We can choose the high road, the “city on the hill,” or slide toward progres- sivism and “the other way.” We have a choice.
up during COVID, fell 58 percent last year. National data measuring “conserva- tism” is spotty but illustrative. With family, faith, tradition, military service, and patriotism signs of “conserva- tism,” beyond economic and law enforcement support data, a long list of US cities by Pew Research puts San Francisco dead last and Portland, Oregon, near the bottom, while Mesa, Arizona — half an hour from Glen- dale — tops the list. The takeaway is simple: Leadership and political priorities do matter. They affect our lives in real ways. America is increasingly “a tale of two cities,” one set conservative, traditional, pro-law enforcement, pro-business, anti-drug, anti-illegal, pro-family, faith, and freedom — not surprisingly safer and more prosperous. The other set is “progressive” and sliding fast.
Robert B. Charles
34 • AMAC Magazine
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