One of the best things about having a human brain is that you can use it to anticipate the results of certain actions, such as walking off the edge of a high cliff, or jumping into deep water if you cannot swim, or drinking from a bottle labelled Poison, and so not take those actions if you want to avoid the ensuing fatal calamity.

In theory, every living human being can choose to avoid foreseeable danger.

In practice, however, it seems that some human brains lack the ability to anticipate.

And the condition is not as rare as might be supposed. By what would seem a remarkable coincidence, a whole group of well-heeled, literate, fully grown Leftists, all sadly lacking the power of anticipation, came to live in the same leafy district in Minnesota. They agreed with each other that the police were morally unacceptable and unnecessary, they would never need them, so they would never call them to come into their pleasant, peaceful neighborhood.

Very soon the peaceful, pleasant neighborhood was no longer peaceful or pleasant.

John Nolte writes at Breitbart:

Anyone worried about this anti-police madness somehow taking hold need only look at Powderhorn Park, Minnesota, where a bunch of affluent, white leftist women have agreed to not involve the police in property crimes …

The far-left New York Times reports that what had been a clean and safe neighborhood, an enclave of activist leftists located just a few blocks from where George Floyd died while in police custody, has quickly fallen apart in just a few weeks.

The residents are now stressed, worried for their own safety, but are still desperately trying to make it work.

“Two weeks ago, dozens of multicolored tents appeared in the neighborhood park. The multiracial group of roughly 300 new residents seems to grow larger and more entrenched every day,” according to the Times.

And with the homeless comes all the problems associated with the homeless, including “heavy car traffic into the neighborhood, some from drug dealers”.

There have already been two overdoses in the encampment, and that encampment was once a leafy park where everyone felt safe.

Was nostalgia stirring up memories of the bad old days when police officers guarded the ladies as they walked their children and dogs on the paths between the well-kept lawns and flowerbeds?

“I’m not being judgmental,” one woman told the Times, but she no longer allows her young children to play in the park. “It’s not personal. It’s just not safe.”

Be judgmental? Be “personal”? Good grief no, never that! Not of the homeless, anyway. They might mug her, but you won’t hear her say that mugging is wrong. Only of the police it’s okay to be judgmental. And personal. Whatever they do they’re wrong –  and she’ll dare to say so loud and clear. Caring about safety doesn’t have to involve the police.

One woman said she stopped walking her dog through the park because the catcalls are so humiliating and now her “emotions change every 30 seconds”.

Imagine it: compassion, loathing, compassion, disgust, compassion, contempt, compassion, revulsion, compassion, fury …

When one resident found a man passed out in the elevator of his apartment building, he tried calling a community activist but she did not pick up. He ended up calling a cop, who he then criticized for kicking the guy out, even though the cop offered to take the vagrant to a hospital.

After he was carjacked at gunpoint by two black teens, one Powderhorn Park resident called the police, an act he later came to regret.

“Been thinking more about it,” he told the Times. “I regret calling the police. It was my instinct but I wish it hadn’t been. I put those boys in danger of death by calling the cops.”

The bottom line, though, is this:

The influx of outsiders has kept Ms. Albers awake at night. Though it is unlikely to happen, she has had visions of people from the tent camp forcing their way into her home. She imagines using a baseball bat to defend herself.

Not being able to call the police, as she has done for decades, has shaken her.

“I am afraid,” she said. “I know my neighbors are around, but I’m not feeling grounded in my city at all. Anything could happen.”

And she’s not the only one:

Angelina Roslik burst into tears, explaining that she had spent the past four years fleeing unstable housing conditions and was struggling more than she cared to admit with the chaos the camp had brought into the neighborhood.

Many in the neighborhood, who were already beleaguered from the financial stresses of the coronavirus, now say they are eager for the campers to move on to stable housing away from the park.

Nolte calls these residents a “group of lunatics”. They include, he says,”a woman who attended classes to challenge her own white privileges and came to see her decision to buy a home in the neighborhood as potentially preventing a person of color from doing so”.

A conscience on the rack!

But it seems that some in the group have been frightened into sanity, and with it the realization that “their lifelong political beliefs are a joke”.

What caused the fright? The market value of their houses has crashed. Predictably of course, but remember they are not capable of prediction. 

How many Powderhorn Park  residents saw their homes as their future? How many invested everything into their homes — not just the purchase, but renovations and landscaping? Look at how quickly that investment dropped to zero. Those homes are worthless now. No one’s going to purchase property in a neighborhood plagued with hundreds of homeless, where no one calls the cops, where the criminals now know they can pretty much get away with anything.

Sadly, everything  Powderhorn Park is dealing with was predictable to anyone who knows anything about the real world.

What’s also predictable is how things are going to get worse. Someone’s going to get raped, someone’s going to get killed, someone’s going to suffer a home invasion…

The bottom line is people, even these idiots, will only stand for this for so long before they are either forced to flee, give up and get those police cruisers patrolling again, or are hurt themselves. …

Reality is reality. … Eventually, the reality becomes so dangerous, you have no choice but to acknowledge it.

Bluff yourself and others as you may, demand your ideal world as feelingly as you may, reality goes on forever accruing its consequences.

Reality makes no concessions, heeds no argument, has no compassion.