Standards Are Not Cruelty

Someone was bitching on Nextdoor about homeless people taking a dump on a sidewalk here in Santa Fe. Fair complaint.

I pointed out, apparently heretical, that shitting on a public sidewalk is illegal. If you or I did it, we’d be cited, charged, or hauled off. But when it’s a homeless person, we suddenly avert our eyes, shrug, and lower the bar of public decency like it’s some enlightened act of compassion.

That doesn’t make any fucking sense to me.

Laws are either laws, or they’re suggestions. Standards are either standards, or they’re decorative words we trot out when convenient. You don’t preserve a society by selectively enforcing the rules based on who generates the most guilt.

So I said as much.

Then I doubled down when people predictably clutched pearls and accused me of being heartless, pointing out that we can’t just let out-of-towners roll in, set up shop in the arroyo, and turn public spaces into biohazards because we’ve decided enforcement feels mean. A society without laws or shared standards isn’t compassionate. It’s chaos.

That’s when some smug asshole chimed in with: “I get your a Christian, seems like a Christian thing to say.”

And there it is. Modern “discourse” in a nutshell. Not engagement. Not argument. Just lazy identity-based sniping. Assume a belief, slap a label on it, declare moral victory, and walk away feeling clever.

For the record: assuming my religious beliefs as a criticism is, pardon my deeply Gen-X phrasing, fucking retarded. And yes, I mean that in the original, developmentally-delayed, drool-cup sense. It’s intellectually lazy. It’s childish. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the issue being discussed.

This is the real problem with public conversation today: it isn’t discourse at all. It’s petulant children vying for status in a sandbox, screaming at each other through tears, hoping someone else’s toy gets taken away. Nobody talks about facts. Nobody engages the actual question. Everything collapses into the same stupid loop:

“Well, at least my guy didn’t do this.”
“Yeah, well, your guy did that, and my guy did this.”

Round and round it goes, through social media, into morning talk shows, all the way to late-night television-an endless carousel of deflection and finger-pointing.

It’s always easier to point at the other tribe than to talk rationally about an issue.

And this behavior isn’t confined to Nextdoor. It’s national politics. It’s workplace discussions. It’s family dinners. We’ve replaced reasoning with branding. Arguments with assumptions. Facts with vibes.

So what the fuck is wrong with people? Is it our educators? Our education system? Or is this just the natural fallout of shoving a keyboard into everyone’s hands and telling them their half-formed thoughts are just as valuable as someone else’s well-reasoned argument?

I don’t know the answer.

But I know this: lowering standards of law, of decency, of thinking itself, is not kindness. It’s abdication. And pretending otherwise doesn’t make us compassionate. It just makes us quieter accomplices to the mess.