Where Are Our Elected Leaders?

When we turn on the news or open the paper, we read about stores being raided by hoodlums in broad daylight, uncontrolled homelessness and trash in city streets, human tragedies at the border, looting, drug overdosing and general lawlessness—all out of control and getting worse—month after month, year after year, while our president has only praise for the state of the union. 

Where are our elected leaders, the council members, legislators, Congress members, senators, governors? Some of them do speak up once in a while, and often forcefully, but still nothing significant happens. Is Pelosi, for instance, happy with what happens in her district in San Francisco? She must be, as I understand she is seeking reelection.

The most devastating problem, however, is the fact that we lose 70,000 American lives every year to illegal drugs smuggled through our borders and distributed throughout our country to our families, neighbors, classmates and friends. This is in addition to millions more we are losing to illegal drug addiction on city streets. We need to take drastic measures, some of which may even inconvenience us, but this will be a small price to pay for resolving these problems.

We could start where the illegal drugs enter our country—at the border. Finish the Wall and have only fully controlled entry ports with state-of-the-art detection equipment for illegal drugs, and establish clear entry rules for the traveling public, visitors, and immigrants, with severe punishments for attempts to bring in illegal drugs. The cost and inconvenience of this will be far less than the losses we are experiencing now. We must get our schools back under parents’ control, bring back academics, and teach our children about the dangers of drugs, starting with preschool and kindergarten, and walk back the marijuana issue we legalized a few years ago. We do not need this and certainly not the tax revenue from it which was an important point in legalizing it.

The United Nations must be engaged in the human disaster at the border. The United States’ assistance to the countries whose citizens are massing at our border is not sufficient to stop desperate people, women with children, walking through deserts and crossing rivers to get here. We know people want to live where they grew up, and the UN must promote and assist programs to make this possible here and in all other parts of the world.

Johannes Christoffersen Washington