J. Pharoah Doss:  The cost of progress

The United States made the list of the top ten countries with the highest divorce rates. Let’s imagine the religious right outlawed divorce in order to rid America of this shame. People would see the prohibition as a clear attempt to eradicate the problem by erasing the statistics without ever addressing the main cause, just so the religious right could rid themselves of their own sense of shame. Progressives, on the other hand, frequently engage in this behavior, but they either explain away the repercussions or, worse, accept them as the necessary cost of progress. For example, in May 2020, Minneapolis police officers killed George Floyd. Even though all of the officers involved were fired and charged with second-degree murder, riots broke out across the country, and there was a call to “defund the police.” The next month, Portland’s city council defunded its police budget for the following year. “Defund the police” wasn’t intended to cut all of law enforcement’s budget. The concept was to withdraw police funding and redistribute it to non-policing forms of public safety and social initiatives that addressed poverty, homelessness, and mental disorders. However, Portland’s city council was ashamed of “American policing,” and their decision was...