VICTOR DAVIS HANSON - THE DARK AGES HAVE HIT CALIFORNIA'S RURAL CITIZENS

National Review Online published VDH's account, "A Vandalized Valley." It is shocking, disheartening, angering. . . 

California has generally been seen as the harbinger of things to come for the entire nation.  Ii so, we face a bleak future indeed.  VDH writes:

I am starting to feel as if I am living in a Vandal state, perhaps on the frontier near Carthage around a.d. 530, or in a beleaguered Rome in 455. . . [VDH he cite brazen of stealing and pillage, even manhole covers! . . .]

In short, all the stuff of civilization — municipal buildings, education, religion, transportation, recreation — seems under assault in the last year by the contemporary forces of barbarism. . .

A couple now in their early 90s lives about three miles away from me on their small farm. I have known them for 50 years; he went to high school with my mother, and she was my Cub Scout leader. They now live alone and have recently been robbed nine, yes, nine, times. . . 

As in 5th-century North Africa, farmers feel that civilization is vanishing and they are on their own. The “authorities” of an insolvent state, like petty Roman bureaucrats, are too busy releasing criminals from overcrowded jails to want any more. The stories of cyclical releases are horrific:

Criminals are not arrested and let go just twice a year, but five and six and ten times. Sometimes we read of the surreal, like this week’s story in my local Selma Enterprise of one criminal’s 36 arrests and releases — and these are only for the crimes we know he committed and was caught for . . . 

[This article is MUST READING...]