Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

Matthew 7:20 (KJV)

As a teacher on vacation, I have engaged in some very simple pleasures here in Coeur d’Alene. I have taken several long walks around town, exploring our beautiful neighborhoods. These walks took me from north of the highway down to the Library, across the downtown, and then back home. I spent time walking the stacks in our splendid Public Library, and swam at my favorite public beach adjacent to North Idaho College.

When we vacation together, my wife and I enjoy being tourists in our delightful home town, engaging in these simple and restorative recreations. We try to never forget that it is a genuine privilege to do such things, and that we should never take them for granted! Coeur d’Alene is no utopia. But it is, as Maine’s state slogan says, the way life should be.

My old neighborhoods in the Bronx, NY, Meriden, CT, and the Portland region of Maine were once largely like this. All of these old homes are now crime-ridden hellscapes where criminal predators rule filthy streets and public services are overwhelmed by illegal aliens, the homeless, and the mentally ill.

Why? Because Democrats abet social dysfunction for political gain. They never ever make their communities better places to live. Instead, they empower themselves by encouraging every social ill. The very need that they cultivate requires government intervention, they say. In fact, they sow misery and reap power.

Fellow Coeur d’Alene residents, never allow Democrats or Progressives to turn our functional home town into yet one more of their dystopian social engineering experiments. By their fruits, know them!