Has any good thing ever come out of Tucson?

With apologies to John 1:46

Tucson is in the news again, and as someone who spent his teenage years there and still visits family a couple times a year, I can tell you that is rarely a good thing. Other than Bob Dylan allegedly composing Forever Young while in town briefly, good things rarely proceed from news stories that begin with, “In Tucson today…” The rest of the sentence almost always contains words like “tragedy,” “horror” and/or “…died in drug-related violence.”

The local news broadcast sounds like a nightly recap of the Tet Offensive.

Even still, a new story on CNN about Tucson tonight made my jaw drop. In a report about how the Supreme Court’s split decision on the merits of Arizona’s ‘papers’ law is going to exponentially increase theworkload of an already cash-strapped police department, it casually mentions in the second graf that Tucson’s police force is already spread paper-thin, “down 160 officers due to [a] weakened economy.”

Of course I had heard stories about local municipalities forced to cut their payrolls to the bone, often by laying off police, firemen and teachers, but I always assumed that was happening in quaint, off-the-beaten-track Mayberries with little crime and even less need of literacy.

But Tucson? How in God’s name could you even consider balancing your budget at the expense of the health and safety of your citizens when you live an hour’s drive from the Mexican border, and your isolated, desert metropolis is a popular pit stop along the superhighway for  the Mexican cartels’ murderous drug trade?

This seems the very textbook definition of insanity, or at least criminally incompetent governance. I don’t know if the town is in GOP or Demo hands and I’m not going to look it up. This budget decision so supercedes issues of partisan affiliation that I wouldn’t care if it was something FDR and George Washington cooked up in the Watergate Wing of the Nixon Presidential Library.

It’s a horrible fucking idea!

And in practice, it is a bloodbath, as evidenced by the local nightly news.

Then I thought about the teachers. We entrust them with the raising of our kids all day Monday through Friday for twelve of the most impressionable years of their lives, but we don’t give a shit about them?

More to the point, if you eliminate educators, you are necessarily dumbing-down the next generation of voters, unlearned citizens who will more easily be convinced to vote against their own self-interest by nonsensical rhetoric and flag-pin wearing. People like a certain, unnamed family member who is a total welfare queen, 100% on the government teat, who hates Obama’s socialist programs (while she lives off their benefits) and can’t wait to vote him out of office to elect candidates who have promised to balance the federal budget by cutting programs including the ones that subsidize her existence.

She is a snapshot of a society shorn of its professional teaching class.

We will make acquiescent, unquestioning serfs for our future overlords.

All of which begs the question, who in their right mind would cut safety and education in a town as smart-people-challenged and crime-ridden as Tucson? Quit watering the damn golf courses! Close down the Desert Museum! Shutter Old Tucson! Let “A” Mountain get overgrown with grass, then light it up on the fourth of July and save money on lawncare as well as fireworks.

Except you don’t have a fire department you could can rely on to put the flames out, do you? Or enough police to patrol the crowds.

Which really raises the question of who in their right minds…?

Then I remembered: These kind of decisions are made by politicians! And most politicians I know, even local ones, do not live in the shit parts of town, even (especially) when their town in 90% shit. Their kids do not go the same shit public schools that most Tucson kids go to.

And that was my answer.

When one lives in a gated, guarded community (which are sprinkled around the perimeter of the town and in the pricey foothills), your house has 24-hour private security, a state-of-the-art fire-suppression system and your kids all go to private schools, you could look at a budget and see the most expendable items as police, firemen and teachers.

As long as the victims of your cost-cutting are just names on the news and numbers on a ledger—and not your own family and friends, people in the circles in which you travel—it is mighty easy to change the channel, or look at the numbers and tell yourself, hey, they could be worse.

The good news for all those anonymous, eminently ignorable names and numbers the decision-makers don’t give a fuck about is that they stand a much better chance than the hoi polloi of their next of kin experiencing the thrill of hearing their name mentioned on the 11 o’clock news.

True, in a sentence that contains the words “tragedy,” “horror” and/or “…died in drug-related violence,” but dammit, they’ll be on TV!

And hey, even though they never got to live a full, long life, at least they found a way out of Tucson.