Today we look at a street and safety in America's desperate need for renewal. That is next.
Hey, welcome back to the Barry Farrar Show. I hope your summer is just going great.
There is a lot to be concerned about with the economy, and we've discussed that before,
and we're going to do that again. But today we discuss a deeper, more perilous issue.
It goes to the very source of whether or not we will keep our republic. In a republic,
the ultimate power is held by the citizens and their elected representatives. The president
is elected by the whole nation through an electoral college. A republic is a little
different than a pure democracy. In a pure democracy, the way you win is just through
absolute majority, and they always win. In a constitutional republic, the elected representatives
make laws under the authority of the Constitution. So a republic has a safeguard of preventing an
angry or wrong majority from changing things on a whim. We can still do things wrong,
but it's just harder. A republic respects the rule of law over mob rule, but it still has a lot
of vulnerabilities. And one of those vulnerabilities was amplified by Benjamin Franklin, and we'll get
back to that in just a minute. But first, I wanted to take you to a street.
There's this wholesome, family-friendly, respectful, and safe America,
and there's this decadent, violent, angry, dangerous, anti-God America.
And they're embodied on a street called Colfax over a period of less than a decade.
This is the longest continuous commercial street in the whole United States. It's about an hour
north of where we raised our kids, and it cuts right across the center of Denver, Colorado's
metropolitan area. It stretches from Aurora through Denver and Lakewood all the way to Golden.
It actually extends for 53 miles. Now, in downtown Denver, near the Colorado State Capitol,
the designation changes from West Colfax Avenue to East Colfax Avenue, and that's right there
at the intersection of Broadway. But I'm just going to call the street Colfax.
This street really informs us. It says a lot about America's need to be good again. There's a bus
route that goes on Colfax. It's called number 15. It goes from one end of Colfax all the way to the
other, and it has the highest bus ridership in the regional transportation district. Not that long
ago, the bus on this route would include a mix of businessmen, even in their suits, and women in
their dresses, and waitresses in their uniforms, and construction workers with their hard hats
in their laps, traveling safely from their homes to and from work. Now, Denver's had its bumps and
its bruises with crime, no doubt, but until just a decade or so ago, families along with workers
could get on this bus and safely travel at low cost from near their homes all the way in Golden
in the west or out in Aurora in the east to visit or work in Denver. For the most part, the bus was
clean and the ride could be even a safe family adventure to the city's downtown. And regardless of
how that family got downtown, when they got there, they could walk hand in hand up and down 16th Street
Mall and the surrounding area and enjoy a Saturday or a Sunday together. I know, we did that. It was a
picture of Norman Rockwell's safe, wholesome, family-friendly America. Unfortunately, that's not
the case now. As detailed by Eli Saslow in his article published just last week, Colfax represents
a really much different picture today. What Eli did is he followed Suna Karabay, a bus driver on
the Colfax bus 15 route, and Suna keeps the bus clean. She makes sure the handrails are disinfected.
She faithfully carries out her 10-hour shift. She tries to put a smile on everything she does.
She greets her first passengers with an enthusiastic, good morning. And the first
passenger is a guy. He's barefoot. He's carrying a blanket and a pillow. He drops 29 cents into the
fare machine for the $3 ride. He says it's all he's got. So Suna waves him on board. She welcomes
the next people in line. Happy Friday, she says. This couple is lugging three plastic garbage bags
of belongings and a large unleashed dog. Seriously, a dog? Big one with no leash?
The guy says, service pet. He's trying to find his bus pass. And while he's trying to do that,
the big dog jumps onto the dashboard, grabs
Suna's box of Kleenex and shreds the tissues on the floor.
Suna's a really courageous woman.
She's strong.
She looks at the guy and says, are you
sure that this is a service dog?
And he's gruff.
What did I tell you already?
This is the passenger with garbage bags of stuff.
He says, just drive the damn bus.
Treating anyone, especially a service provider
on a public transportation vehicle
with this level of disrespect was just
really rare a few years ago.
I mean, you might find it in Philly or Chicago,
but not Denver.
Unfortunately, it's now part of Suna's everyday life.
Sazlo goes on to report that as Suna, the bus driver,
stops every few blocks, she picks up more passengers
in front of extended stay motels, budget restaurants,
and she's just constantly on edge.
And in the past two years, there's a good reason for that.
Denver area bus drivers have reported
being assaulted by their passengers
more than 145 times.
And in spite of Suna's great customer service skills,
she's no exception.
She's been spit on, hit with a toolbox,
threatened with a knife, pushed in the back while driving,
and she was chased into a restroom
during her six-minute break.
In fact, her windshield has been shattered
with rocks or glass bottles, and not just once, but three times.
So Suna picks up this high school girl who's smoking.
Suna says, sorry, you can't do that.
The girl says, it's just weed.
Not on here, Suna says.
So the girl tosses the joint onto the sidewalk,
and she bangs her fist on the first row of seats.
But Suna tries to just do her job.
She drives the bus, and she tries to pick people up
and drop off the passengers just as graciously as she can.
At the end of Colfax, Suna will take this six-minute break
before turning around and going back the other way.
But first, she has to do, as graciously as possible,
this job that's hard, and that is kick off
the people that are sleeping on the bus.
And in this case, there are seven.
About a quarter of her riders are homeless,
and they use the bus as sort of a mobile day motel.
But she still has to move them out at the end of the line,
and that's the rule for all kinds of good reasons,
the least of which is to sanitize the bus
between shifts or between extensions of that run.
But this is not a job for the faint of heart.
I mean, Suna has just one passenger on this shift
who just won't get off.
So she goes back to his seat.
Sir, she says, tapping on his shoulder.
He had this open wound on his ankle.
It's really yucky, ooze coming out.
His leg is shaking.
She says, sir, are you okay?
He opens his eyes.
He coughs.
He spits on the floor.
He looks around, and he says, are we in Tulsa?
Suna says, no, this is Denver.
This is the 15 line.
The passenger stumbles to his feet.
Suna says, do you want me to call an ambulance for you?
He shook his head.
He started limping toward the doors.
Suna does the best she can.
She says, okay, have a good day.
On his way out, walking off the bus,
he gives her the finger.
So Suna gets this treatment all day, every day.
She normally just tries to drive the bus
with as little fanfare as possible,
but there's just some things she can't ignore.
For example, a construction worker sat down
in the first row next to a teenage girl
who scooted away from him just as much as she could
and toward the window.
He was openly hitting on her, disgusting.
Well, the girl was anxious about it.
She goes, look, I'm 15, the girl said.
I'm in high school.
Well, the creep kept at it,
trying to hit on her and say things he shouldn't be saying.
And that was it.
So Suna stepped in.
She leaned out from her seat,
looked back at him and said, leave her alone.
So the creep feigns compliance,
but he continues to hover right on the border of indecency.
So Suna's day job shows us a world
that has just lost all form of civility.
There's no concept of restraint for the public good.
Whether one has a personal relationship with God or not,
in times past, most people believed that God is righteous
and that his guidance,
at least on matters of civil decorum, is worthy of respect.
Or if they didn't believe in God,
they at least acknowledged this general notion of respect,
but not anymore.
For example, a passenger, a man in a red bikini,
was smoking fentanyl.
Suna told him to stop.
He spit on her and he yelled at her saying,
here, I'm giving you COVID, bitch.
This is constant.
Another man swallowed this handful of pills
right in front of her.
And he explained that he poisoned himself
so she would have to call an ambulance
so that he could spend some time in the hospital
with some warm meals and a bed.
It's really this bad.
Passengers yell at her for no good reason.
They get on the bus and they continue to badger her.
They call her stupid.
They call her dumbass and much worse.
They insult her because they're late for work or just mad at everyone.
They've got to take it out on someone so they take it out on her.
They are out of control.
For example, passengers shout at her to hurry up when Colfax is wall-to-wall vehicles.
It's a busy street, especially in the Central Business District area.
There's little she can do.
So she'll even try to oblige them and creep up right to the brake lights of the car in
front of her to try and settle people down.
I am doing the best I can.
But they don't relent.
It's so illogical.
It's crazy.
They'll say, hey, do you speak English?
Get your ass moving or get back to Mexico.
By the way, Suna's from Turkey.
Anyway, her job on America's street is constantly revealing the underbelly of the anti-God political
left.
It's just not good for anyone.
Recently, an intoxicated woman jumped in front of a number 15 bus.
Not at a bus stop.
The bus driver stopped.
The intoxicated woman shoved her way on board.
She cursed at other passengers as she paced up and down the aisle.
She was angry and yelling.
There was this man, twice her size, punched her hard.
She slammed to the floor and she's unconscious.
The other passengers didn't do a thing.
Not a thing.
She just lay there, knocked out.
Then he stomped on her chest while he was yelling on the bus about his right to do so.
Then at the next stop, he grabbed her unconscious by the ankles and threw her off.
She smacked into the curb and later died of blunt force.
This absurd violence is not just among the mentally ill.
This man just believed he had societal permission to shut the lady up.
She was out of control, so he could be out of control.
In his mind, there would be no consequence.
Violence has become common and trauma has become part of the normal day.
Not even an open murder phases people, literally.
Just seconds right after this murder.
One of the other passengers on the bus said to the bus driver, we can keep riding though.
We got to go to work, man.
Each time Suna comes to that stop, she braces herself and you can certainly understand why.
On this particular day, a big burly man who was a belligerent passenger for no valid purpose
gets out of his seat while the bus is still moving and comes to the front of the bus at
the same stop where the murder happened.
Suna's just kind of bracing herself and she's just trying to keep some order, but he takes
offense.
He bangs his fist into the windshield as he cursed and exited the bus.
She takes a minute to collect herself and then welcomes the next passengers aboard.
She does this five days a week.
The bus retires for the night at Union Station.
This is a beautifully newly renovated place in downtown Denver, a half a billion dollars
worth of renovation, but that didn't make the people good.
It's lawless.
A lot of her passengers sleep here at night.
The long indoor corridor is home to a massive opioid epidemic.
There's a few hundred people that sleep on benches.
The city at one time removed the benches, but then the people just slept on the floor.
When they closed the bathrooms, people just did their business out in the open.
You know, Denver's just not what it used to be.
It's not this mostly good place where you could safely take your young children on a
family outing.
Officers pay the price for belittling the police and for lax prosecution.
A number of crimes have just been loosened outright, so much so that the criminals back
out on the street within hours of being booked.
Homelessness is up over 50% since 2020.
Violent crime is up by 17%.
Murders are up by 47%.
Property crime has nearly doubled and seizures of fentanyl and meth quadrupled in the past
year.
Denver isn't the only troubled city.
All the cities run by bad policy, all by far left Democrats whose governors and mayors
have openly denigrated traditional moral values, whose policies overtly disregard the traditional
nuclear family, whose personal views are known to be anti-God.
All those cities are in visible decline.
The statistics show it.
Philadelphia, Chicago, LA, Seattle, Portland, Baltimore, New York.
They have
as much as an 80% increase in rape, sexual assault, and murder.
You know, the sad story on Colfax is that it's a picture of an America that desperately needs help.
Freedom is not secured by giving the most dangerous people unfettered reign to inflict
terror on everyone else. Let's circle back to Benjamin Franklin. He was actually an optimist,
but he'd traveled the world and he'd seen lots of different government forums and he'd studied it
all his life. And at 81 years of age, in his final speech before the Constitutional Convention,
he said the following, when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint
wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions,
their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. And he was talking about
men he respected, whom he thought were basically noble, basically honorable. They still needed
checks and balances. And he thought the Constitution was about as good as you can get.
He had this friend, her name was Elizabeth Powell. She was a prominent woman in Philadelphia and she
was the wife of the mayor. She often hosted convention delegates and their wives in their
home. She also later became close friends with George and Martha Washington. That's because
George spent most of his presidency in the temporary capital of Philadelphia while D.C. was
getting built. Anyway, right after the Constitutional Convention, Mrs. Powell asks Ben Franklin whether
the new Constitution was a monarch or a republic. And he famously answered saying, a republic,
if you can keep it. So Elizabeth immediately shot back, and why not keep it? Ben Franklin responds,
because the people on testing the dish are always disposed to eat more of it than does them good.
In other words, if you're getting a benefit from the government, it's just too hard to turn it
down. So as more and more constituents get more and more benefits from the government over time,
the republic will denigrate to a democracy and the majority will vote in for themselves more
and more benefits and the limited government aspiration of a republic will be lost. He also
spoke to the presidency itself. He said the executive office will always be increasing here
as elsewhere till it ends in a monarchy. The first man put at the helm will be a good one.
Nobody knows what sort may come after. You know, he was speaking of our first president.
George Washington could have demanded anything he wanted. He certainly could have run for four terms.
Yet he voluntarily limited himself to two terms. He did that to set a precedent. Government should
be limited and the leaders should not manipulate the system to increase their power. The precedent
would be honored until the power-hungry left-wing Democrat FDR came along. We had to ratify the 22nd
amendment to the U.S. Constitution to prevent another debacle like that. But the idea was
straightforward and it was magnanimous. To George Washington, he would have to model some form of
limitation, some self-limitation, paraphrasing his own musings. We're not setting up a dictatorship,
not even a benevolent dictatorship. We're making the decision as a government to muddle through
with checks and balances of a republic. At the end of the day, a republic is sort of fragile.
You have elected representatives. They need accountability. I mean, they should be basically
respectful of law out the gate. They should be courteous toward one another and honorable in
their dealings. But that requires the people who elect them to have some of those same internal
moral navigation systems. If the people lose their moral bearing, America's system won't survive.
There are presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan to Clinton who attempted to discuss this, to unify and
rally Americans back to their wholesome place by using the following quote, America is great because
America is good. If America ever stops being good, it will stop being great. Now they attributed that
quote to Alexis de Tocqueville. He was America's most famous tourist from France, wrote about
his travels here. But there's actually no written record of this quote in Alexis' own
writings. Yet others have given him credit for this quote. The most recent known written source
is Sherwood Eddy. He's an evangelist who lived from 1871 to 1963. And in his 1941 book, he provides
an expanded version that he attributes to Tocqueville. And a whole bunch of politicians
have taken from this and lifted it. And political thinkers have as well. Here it is.
I sought for the greatness and the genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample
rivers, and it was not there. I sought for the greatness and the genius of America in her fertile
fields and boundless forests, and it was not there. I sought for the greatness and genius
of America in her rich mines and her vast world continent.
Amherst, and it was not there. I sought for the greatness and the genius of America in
her public school system, in her institutions of learning, and it was not there. I sought
for the greatness and genius of America in her Democratic Congress, in her matchless
Constitution, and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard
her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power.
America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she
will cease to be great.
Well, that's what Eddie said Tocqueville said, and it's pretty powerful. We just can't find
source proof that Tocqueville actually wrote that, but he might have said something like
that. He might have said exactly that. In 1908, the Methodist Review quotes Tocqueville
as saying that he searched in vain for the sources of America's distinction until he
entered a church, and they have it a little bit differently. They say that he said,
It was there, as I listened to the soul-equalizing and soul-elevating principles of the gospel
of Christ, as they fell from Sabbath to Sabbath upon the masses of the people, that I learned
why America is great and free and why France is a slave.
There are other variants of those quotes. One was published in 1886, but as best as
I can uncover, the original source comes from a book published in 1835 by Andrew Reid
and James Matheson, two British ministers. They came to the United States in 1834 to
promote unity and friendship among their sister churches. They weren't as famous as Alexis
to Tocqueville, but they traveled the country like he did, and they wrote about it, and
when they wrote about their travels, they essentially said the same thing that you saw
above in that quote, and they concluded with a slightly different conclusion.
America will be great if America is good. If not, her greatness will vanish away like
a morning cloud.
Now regardless of who you attribute the quote to, the words themselves have truth and they're
powerful. America is based on a solid system of checks and balances, but no system is strong
enough to endure if the people running the show are evil. Our elected officials should
have some decency. They should have some semblance of respect for goodness, and that
means the people putting them in office should also have some respect. Without some moral
bearing, the theme that we see on Colfax is going to continue to spread, and what Ben
Franklin feared will be realized.
So what should government do? Well, I mean, it can clean up streets like Colfax by simply
reestablishing tested policies that allow you to prosper by creating a path for your
two basic needs to be met. It can protect your physical existence. For example, government
should not employ destructive policies that interfere with your food supply or your access
to cheap fuel or your access to the products that come from cheap fuel. It should not print
money and just give it away. Those things lower the value of your purchasing power and
make you less prosperous, yet the Fed has done all this and more to interfere with your
freedom and your prosperity.
Number two, state and local governments can protect your physical safety. For example,
government should not violate private property rights by abdicating its responsibility. You
can't just sit there and watch the criminal do his dastardly deed. It should never let
the bad guys threaten your safety without a credible threat of punishment. The police
should step in. It should swiftly prosecute all violations of property rights. It should
certainly strongly prosecute all violent crimes. It should be equipped to police neighborhoods
and all the public spaces. It should make it delightful to be a tourist and frightening
to be a criminal.
We don't want, we don't need the government to decide on our friendships or our family
relationships. We don't need the government to promote perversion upon our children. We
don't need the government to promote delusional concepts like a man can't be pregnant. We
just need the government to do its job, to keep us safe. And a good place to start would
be to clean up streets like Colfax.
It's time for those who believe in mutual respect and equal treatment and goodness to
outvote the leftists who don't. But this problem is bigger than a vote. To sustain
a positive change toward kindness, we need a massive return to God and to his created
order, to a healthy nuclear family, a return to a place where we celebrate the miracle
of each man and each woman, each boy and each girl being created in his image.
To your freedom.
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