The situation is dire in downtown Duluth, and it only seems to be getting worse. In recent years we’ve seen a large increase in the number of homeless people living downtown, bringing an assortment of problems with them. Among them is a large drug problem that impacts the city in so many negative ways. Now recently we have men with weapons having standoffs with police while on fire escapes, and naked men running through the streets and then disappearing into the sewers.
Why is it that we allow this chaos to continue? Why does this problem keep getting worse, and not better? Nobody benefits from these problems that we are seeing. Kids are not made better people by seeing homeless defecate on the street. Businesses are not more productive when customers and employees have to step over used needles in the streets in order to get inside. Nobody’s day is brightened when they are harassed by a pushy panhandler as they go about their day. Naked mentally ill people surely don’t attract customers to an area.
Society isn’t made better by allowing these problems to exist. If these problems continue to exist, then it is clear that our local government is not doing anything about them. If society doesn’t benefit from the existence of these problems, but the local government allows them to exist, then somebody along the way must be benefiting from these issues – but who?
Any time we bring up these problems, we’re told we need more funding for social programs and that we need to hire more social workers. But the problems never get solved, and nothing ever improves. The next time we complain we are told we need even more social workers. We’re beginning to see a pattern here. We keep getting more social workers and organizations to solve these problems but instead of solving problems we seem to just keep creating more jobs while the problems go unsolved. It seems like the people charged with solving the problems of our city are perpetually making the problem worse and creating more power for themselves and telling us it’s a solution. None of us stand to benefit from allowing these problems to exist unless you’re part of the system tasked to fix the problem – if they could actually solve these problems they’d actually work themselves out of a job.
It’s time we start finding solutions to these problems on our own, rather than relying on a system that leeches off of the people they are supposed to help. We have willingly give untold millions of dollars and the very fabric of our society is being destroyed in front of our eyes. Like wolves in sheep’s clothing, politicians and their programs tell us they’re going to fix everything. They spend millions on government jobs and hire as many as they can. They start non-profits to “help” and siphon money out of our local businesses. It’s becoming apparent that things are getting worse by design and certain groups of people are keen to keep it that way.