Posted on 09/09/2025 6:39:26 AM PDT by Starman417
The black community’s disengagement from ordinary acts of civic responsibility is harming America as a whole, but mostly, it’s harming blacks. To save their communities, blacks need to reengage with what was once normative polite conduct across American society. To appreciate this point, consider the tales told by abandoned shopping carts and litter.
Shopping carts were invented in Oklahoma in 1937 and changed the face of retailing. No longer were customers limited to what they could carry around the store, they could now leisurely stroll the store not having to worry about how much they could fit in their cloth bag or how tired their arms might grow. Today we’re largely indifferent about carts because the idea of them is so ingrained in our shopping experience that we can’t imagine a time when they didn’t exist.
As functional as carts are for the shopping experience however, there’s a different function that they serve that is equally important, but in a completely different context.
Shopping carts serve as a great proxy for observing conscientiousness. What one does with a shopping cart tells a lot about a person. Most stores that have shopping carts have a bin for you to return them so you don’t have to go all the way back to the actual store. But here’s the thing about shopping carts. You get no compensation for returning them. Nor do you (normally) suffer any consequences for not returning them. The only people impacted by your returning the cart to the bin are others. Returning it is just the right thing to do.
As such, most people return their carts to the bins as one would expect a normal person to do. But others simply leave them in the next spot or put them on the curb next to their car. There are consequences of such behavior of course, but rarely for the person who left the cart. The cart can take up a space so that someone else has to get out of their car and move it before they can park. It can start rolling in the parking lot and hit a car or a person. Employees have to go around and collect those stray carts and return them to the bin or the store.
Another such measure is littering. Littering is one more of those little things where the cost of doing the right thing is usually minor, but the consequences for the individual not doing so are generally nonexistent. Litter does of course have negative consequences on the community however, from the cost of pickup to aesthetics to clogging up drains and polluting waters.
Whether it’s leaving a shopping cart in the middle of a parking lot or throwing trash on the street, both are among the most basic measures one can have of citizenship. Usually no one is harmed and doing what’s right typically takes but a few seconds of the person’s time.
It’s instructive when one notices that people aren’t taking those few seconds to do the right thing. It’s like the old saying, “If you want to know someone’s character, watch how they treat people who can do nothing for them.” We’ve all seen people who are rude to waiters or store clerks, and usually they’re self-centered assholes. Same thing with shopping carts and litter.
At the end of the day, across the country you see communities covered in litter and too many shopping carts that were not only not returned to the bin, but were outright stolen. Here’s the thing: Shopping carts and litter are just the most benign signs of conscientiousness & citizenship. The lack of such betrays itself in far more malignant ways as well, and we’re seeing that across the country particularly in videos. Spirit Airlines airport counters. Six Flags parks. Carnival Cruise line ships. Seemingly every restaurant chain in America. Malls. Schools. Subways. And of course, street takeovers. This bad behavior seems to be everywhere, and one segment of society is perpetuating most of it: Blacks.
It appears to be the case that for a very large segment of black America the ideas of conscientiousness and good citizenship are simply nonexistent.
This might sound like a peripheral issue, but in reality it’s anything but. It’s what’s called the Tragedy of the Commons, individuals acting in selfish ways that harm society as a whole.
The perfect example of this is when individuals or packs of looters steal from stores. When it becomes expensive enough, either through having to implement security measures or replace damaged property or buying new inventory, eventually the stores close. The result is that citizens of the community have fewer shopping options available to them. Then, when store fronts remain vacant they become magnets for graffiti and vandalism. More vacant properties scare off potential customers, attract the homeless, drug addicts and squatters, and eventually even more crime. The final outcome usually being the driving down of property values, tax revenues and finally decay.
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
Liberals complain about how there are food deserts in many places.
They complain how there are not major chain supermarkets in some neighborhoods in cities.
But the liberals do not acknowledge why companies make business decisions not to locate in certain places.
There are reasons things were the way they were.
Time to finally fix this mess.
I worked in a supermarket in 1967. It was set up so you could not take a shopping cart into the parking lot. You had to bring your car to the curb to unload your cart into your trunk.
yep, liberals want to pretend its about racism. When businesses only care about one color... GREEN!
If there are no businesses where they are needed, there is a reason that involves the color GREEN.
LBJ’s Great Society destroyed the black family unit.
Trump wants to bring industry back to America. That will help everyone, including urban blacks. Good jobs bring stability.
So of course the Democrats are against that. “Free trade” Republicans are, too.
Quite an inconvenience for senior citizens. But I can’t blame the stores. You gotta do what you gotta do.
Am leaving St Louis for a reason.
True.
Agreed.
Just do a wheelie and your out biggest waste of money ever those failed everywhere
To put it bluntly, our society is being looted from both the top and the bottom: most visibly, poor blacks in big cities, and less visibly our corrupt and entitled managerial class.
The latter outsources, hires illegals, H1Bs, etc., and does the "pump and dump" to loot publicly traded companies to get bonuses and cash in stock options based on quarterly profits, decisions that ultimately destroy the company.
Both do immense harm, but the second probably more so.
People should live where the crime isn’t. Let the criminals play with each other.
> Just do a wheelie… <
Ha, good point. I suppose those carts only work for those folks who wouldn’t steal them in the first place.
PITA to always remember to bring a coin but it's effective.
The author is wrong to paint the entire “black community” with one brush. The apathy towards crime he points out can be found in most low income, low education,urban centers plagued by absent fathers and easy availability of drugs and alcohol. It doesn’t help that the homeless are more likely to congregate to such areas since their presence will be better tolerated by the officials and residents.
What is alarming is the attitude that law abiding blacks who live in such places need to just put up with the people and conditions that let crime flourish. Often because they are told to bring attention to the problems is racist. Combine that with do-gooder officials whose policies down right encourage absent fathers, poor schooling, more homeless, and worst of all more crime and you get just what we see now.
However the non-criminals do need to realize that things like food deserts, lack of amenities, petty crimes, urban decay, and bad schools are indeed a result (in part) of them tolerating such for too long. Instead I believe many will harp at the government to fix things. But as I stated above this is not just seen in “black communities.”
This has always been about behavior rather than race.
> To put it bluntly, our society is being looted from both the top and the bottom <
I forget who first said it: Only the middle class plays by the rules.
The author is wrong to paint the entire “black community” with one brush. The apathy towards crime he points out can be found in most low income, low education,urban centers plagued by absent fathers and easy availability of drugs and alcohol. It doesn’t help that the homeless are more likely to congregate to such areas since their presence will be better tolerated by the officials and residents.
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