Kharkiv, the city where I grew up, gets bombed every night with actual bombs. But it’s more livable, looks prettier, and has more life in it than St Louis. It doesn’t look like this:
Mind you, these images are not from the site hit by the recent tornado. This is how parts of St Louis always look.
In Kharkiv, people come out after every bombing to clear out the rubble, plant flowers, repaint. They dress prettily, they beautify their spaces.
In St Louis, it’s neighborhood upon neighborhood of this complete despondency. Precious Victorian buildings crumbling down. Abandoned churches. What was done to these people that they are more hopeless and have less will to live than people in an actual war of invasion?
Downtown St Louis is dead. On weekends, it’s completely empty save for the drug-addled homeless. You can hear the sound of your own footsteps anywhere in the downtown area on a Sunday. No cars, no tourists. Even the parts that aren’t bombed out ruins are empty. The roads in the center of the city are catastrophically bad. The whole feel of the city is dead, decaying, miserable. There are a couple of wealthy neighborhoods that look very pretty but they are enclaves in a sea of decay.
Now imagine New York given over to this malignant force that sucks life out of cities. Folks, it will be literally less destructive to invite Putin to bomb it for a year. These Mamdanis are that dangerous. They don’t just kill the buildings and the roads. They kill the spirit of a place. Putin invaded Ukraine against the will of Ukrainians. Are we going to give ourselves willingly to destruction when we don’t even have to?
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