Will Syrians become Orioles fans?

‘Damascus on the Chesapeake’

Baltimore city is a rough place in the best of times. It’s most famous for the TV show The Wire, where local crime lords murder one another over the right to poison one another with drugs. In real life, it’s most famous for the cops killing some local hood, setting off a short riot in the great tradition of #blacklivesmatter. Baltimore is a shit hole.

This was not always the case. In the 1950’s and into the 60’s, it was a thriving working class city. Then a lot of smart people decided that the polices that had worked for so long had to be thrown out and replaced with stuff they learned in college. The blacks rioted, burned big chunks of the city and the whites fled to the suburbs, taking their tax dollars with them. Baltimore never recovered from the 60’s.

The proof of that is the Freddy Gray incident. A reasonably stable community can handle things like a corruption scandal, a police scandal or a natural disaster. There’s enough human capital available so that resources can be temporarily diverted to the problem. You throw out the crooks, reform the cops or clean up the flood and then get back to business.

Dysfunctional cities on the knife’s edge can’t take a punch. In the case of Baltimore. the Freddy Gray incident sent the local government reeling, they blamed the cops, who then stopped doing their job, which is to hold the line against the barbarians. The result is a huge spike in crime. Baltimore has become a killing field again as the gangs figured out that the cops are not going to intervene.

There have been a lot of “solutions” tried for cities like Baltimore, none of which are based in observable reality. The hard cold truth is the place is like it is because it is run by the people running it. As Lee Kuan Yew observed, men are not equal in talents and only God can change that reality. The best we can do is make the most of what nature provided. In the case of Baltimore, the most the population can produce is a city similar to Lagos.

One way to not fix Baltimore is to import a bunch of new people, like Syrians for instance, into the city and hoping they can level the place up a notch.

The war in Syria is forcing millions to flee their homes, and the United States is working to accept 10,000 of the fleeing refugees over the next year.

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) in Baltimore has resettled more than two dozen Syrians so far this year, and they are preparing to help more.

“They are desperate to seek safety,” the IRC’s executive director, Ruben Chandrasekar, said. “They are desperate to be given a new chance at a new life.”

The International Rescue Committee in Baltimore has welcomed 26 Syrians by providing them with the tools to succeed, including a furnished apartment and even employment.

They say their program is successful because refugees are eager to start their new lives free from persecution.

“They want nothing more than to get employed, play their taxes and be able to do the normal stuff you and I take for granted,” said Chandrasekar.

Nearly 90 percent of the refugees the IRC assists become self sufficient, which in turn helps Baltimore thrive as a city.

The word “thrive” is not what comes to mind, but perhaps in relative terms they are correct. Living in a blown out row house in East Baltimore is a step up from a blown up mud hut in the Near East. That and Syrians are unlikely to start street gangs based on the stylings of the hip-hop community. In a generation or two some will strap dynamite to their chest and run into the local Synagogue, but that’s a long time from now and whatever.

What you’re seeing here is a total disregard for the locals, who are a dumpster fire on their best days. Adding another burden to a city that can barely maintain civic order is criminal. Of course, the reason people like Ruben Chandrasekar think it is great is they live in the county and they get to feel like saints by helping foreigners come to America, without it costing them a dime.

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