Excellent points all. @herandrews made these points here a few years ago when the 'Karen' meme first took off.

Anyone who has travelled in the 3rd world knows that 'private order/public squalor' is often the general rule precisely because there's no such public spiritedness. https://twitter.com/niall_gooch/status/1287832490594443265

And why would there be? Sisyphean doesn't even begin to cover what it would be like to wage a one-person struggle for good order & discipline in, say, Lagos.

Inside the walled homes of N. Africa, for example, all is order, often wonderfully so. But step out into Cairo, or

Algiers, and there are mounds of garbage, tangles of power lines (often pirated power lines, at that), and traffic is a howling wilderness, as anyone who tried to exhibit anything resembling civilized motoring habits would never get anywhere at all.

We're going to see a lot

more of that here, I fear. The word 'Brazilification,' clumsy and somewhat unfair as it is, has been getting tossed around here for a while for a reason.

It starts with no one wanting to say anything to the boor with a full cart in the 10 Items or Less lane,

and it ends with something like a Western version of the walled compounds of the Middle East/N. Africa, where everything outside your locked front gate is 'somebody else's problem,' which is the same as saying it's nobody's problem, or that nobody cares.

It's how the public

square is surrendered, in other words, and you don't really need to be James Q. Wilson to know that.

It's been something about the 'Karen' meme that's been bugging me about the mask regs, too: the lowly American retail worker is left standing, in a way, as the last bastion of the old Victorian and Edwardian virtues and regulations.

RE masks: after the last two months, is *any* cop going to dare pester a black American for failure to wear a thin piece of cloth over their face and nose? Really?!

OFC not. And frankly I don't blame them. And so it is left to the 19 year old at CVS to be the last

person in anything resembling authority in America to actually put their foot down, and how sad a thing that is for all parties involved. Most especially those retail workers.

(And it's an added insult that the sort of blue-check mouthing off here about 'Karens'

has, I wager, *never* worked a summer or two at a fast food restaurant or a grocery store. It's not an experience I imagine is common to the sort of 20-something whose parents can help them with the rent and utilities each month in Arlington or NY...)

I'll close this 'Going to the Dogs' rant with, again, my old Lebanese friend and mentor, who simply can't believe the terrible demons we're so blithely summoning. We're really, *really* going to be sorry, and much sooner than we think.