By David Bittinger

March ^8th, 2026

You’ve probably noticed an outdoor activity that’s increasingly popular in America now: chaos and criminality in areas that once seemed safe. Take care on sidewalks, even ones where the most common crime used to be littering. Drive cautiously, even on roads that were safely relied on by drivers with an important destination, say, a job or a medical appointment.

Now these areas can quickly become sites for performance of political rage. Mobs of wild-eyed people waving angry slogans might swarm your body or block your vehicle. Try to avoid conversation. Drive through at your own risk.

If you live in a city where Republicans are rare as a snowbird in hell, your chances of having noticed this problem are high. The woke folks who vote for the warm embrace of collectivism are always spoiling for a fight and love their street riots. And they’re still identified as idealistic “protestors” by sympathetic media.

Like the exotically dangerous life? Try San Francisco. Attempting to walk its streets now, you need to weave carefully around drug paraphernalia and (yuck) human paraphernalia. Experienced San Franciscans parking on a street roll down car windows and leave the glove compartment open, hoping to reduce the likelihood of street progressives bashing windows in search of anything they can find.

How did our country get here? This path to public chaos and criminality could be described by the famous line of a character in a 1926 Hemingway novel. Asked how he went bankrupt, he replied, “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

Acceptable public behavior in America changed gradually over many years, then, in recent years, suddenly. The suddenness of this change might be recognized by the tiny minority of younger people who are well read, but is obvious to people with long memories, people able to recall President Eisenhower, people my age.

Most American schools once provided students classes in the subject of “civics,” which included the country’s foundational documents, especially the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution; patriotic citizen’s rights and responsibilities, such as voting and jury duty; and American values and heroes, including pioneers and inventors.

Do civics classes sound antique, maybe relevant as a big old phone book (assuming you recall big old phone books)? Since civics classes are virtually gone now, could you guess in which decade they quickly disappeared?

OK, too easy. Everyone guessed the 1960s, right?

The public chaos and criminality so popular now might seem general, but it has two major sources.

One is easily identified: ideologues who think Israel is evil and its mostly Jewish population as well as supporters of Israel are evil-doers. In the past, these ideologues denied that this attitude was grounded in antisemitism, but now they’re likely just to rationalize it, muttering about “Zionism” and “international banking.”

Old-fashioned American antisemitism had old-fashioned sources. New England blue blood types tended not to want Jews in their Pilgrim-founded neighborhoods or country clubs. Some rustics harbored a prejudice against Jews comparable to a fantasized prejudice against Martian invaders: They knew little about Jews except that they seemed alien beings with threatening skills. In national politics, powerful Dixiecrats had about the same tolerance for Jews that they had for other minorities: little to none.

Those of us who recall significant detail about the previous century plus those younger people exposed to it (both groups are shrinking minorities) know what happened from 1933 – 1945 to Europe’s Jewish population of about nine million human beings: Approximately two-thirds of them were murdered in what is known as the Holocaust.

In 1949 The United Nations recognized Israel as a nation, a home for surviving Jews. Its tiny, roughly 20,000-square-mile area has always been dwarfed by the roughly 3,000,000-square-mile area of surrounding nations that are almost entirely Arab and Muslim. Today Israel’s residents are 25% non-Jewish, 21% of that Arab, while Jews are not permitted even to enter most Arab nations.

As any thinking person knows — and as some students at prestigious American universities will scream at you in an instant — the legitimacy of the state of Israel and of American support for it has been challenged for 77 years, again and again through war and terrorism.

Without recounting the never-ending political arguments on this subject, it’s worth considering that Jewish students at some prestigious American colleges and universities are now harassed and threatened in ways reminiscent of German territories very early in the Holocaust. Extreme violence and deportations are not yet common here, but the chaos and criminality in such resurgent antisemitism is growing. If you doubt this, talk to someone with a Jewish child at one of those prestigious colleges or universities. I’ve had such conversations. They’re disturbing.

Or try attending a lecture or “protest” on the Israel subject. Watch your back.

There’s another chaos and criminality movement more visible now. Its roots are in the 2020 – 2024 Democrat-sanctioned illegal immigration of 10 – 15 million people. (Nobody knows the actual number, which was an element of their strategy.)

This one uses a favorite tactic of the left: projection. If your political axis is creating chaos and criminality, accuse the opposite political axis of chaos and criminality. In this case, the enforcement of immigration law, a federal responsibility made increasingly difficult by cities and states declaring themselves “sanctuary” jurisdictions, has been turned into a raging battle fought on city streets.

If you’re an American citizen who traffics drugs or children, assaults a woman jogging through a park or shoots a police officer sitting in a squad car, you might benefit from a soft line of defense: Soros prosecutors in Democrat cities who prefer to dismiss criminal charges and often decline to prosecute even repeat criminals.

But if you travel from another country, simply stroll across the southern border, and commit such crimes, you can find a hard line of defense: a sanctuary jurisdiction that actively protects criminals from immigration law enforcement.

Criminals south of the border don’t get such service.

Pointing out the human and financial problems of this extended, actual insurrection should be obvious. But after four decades of the sanctuary movement, the costs are “progressively” denied. Leftists who still mistake such Marxist utopianism for functional government have been in ideological denial for over a century.

These problems involve an obstruction of law, of course, but also a perversion of basic citizenship. Maybe we could propose a modernized American civics course here.

Such a proposal has a creative antecedent, one made by Holocaust survivor, psychiatrist and brilliant essayist Viktor Frankl. In the 1962 American edition of Frankl’s masterpiece translated from German as Man’s Search for Meaning, he floated an idea theoretical yet meaningful. Noting the increasingly irresponsible and socially destructive behaviors he’d been observing in his patients and society at large, he suggested that the Bill of Rights and Statue of Liberty on America’s East Coast should be counterbalanced by a Bill of Responsibilities and Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

Of course, that was 1962 and a California in which civic responsibility had not yet become as illusory as Hollywood. Frankl’s revolutionary theory of psychology, which he called logotherapy, moved on from the injury/illness focus of Freudian therapy to a focus on values — what an individual saw as truly meaningful in life. Frankl’s theory produced life-changing experiences in many people. Laughable as the elevation of values and responsibility might seem today, his Statue of Responsibility produced no critical laughter at that time.

Now, my idea for a bill of Remedial Citizenship could justifiably produce laughter, but that’s OK. I like a good laugh in a good cause.

Remedial Citizenship for the 21st Century 

1. Unless the new wave of Marxism overwhelms sovereign nationhood, you as a legal citizen of the United States should respect your citizenship. The freedoms of citizens guaranteed by the Bill of Rights must be sustained by citizen responsibility.
2. Citizens should vote faithfully for their representatives in municipal, state and national elections. Non-citizens taking up residence here may not vote at all. Respecting our country’s legal immigrants past and present, recognize that illegal immigrants are also ineligible for free schooling or health care and any type of public assistance, which are funded by citizens. Non-residents scamming taxpayer money in fraudulent schemes will be prosecuted, not protected for their votes.
3. As a patriotic American who shares responsibilities of safety and solvency with your fellow citizens, you should respect the legal necessity of returning residents who are here illegally to their own countries. Once there, if they have no criminal record, they can apply for legal American citizenship after getting in line behind all previous applicants. (It’s a long line.)
4. Responsible demonstrations and public protests are protected by the Constitution’s first amendment. But any public activity interfering with other citizens’ rights, travel, or exposure to violence is prosecutable. And if you glue yourself to anything public, you might just get left there.
5. Responsible citizens don’t interfere with, through objects at, use vehicles to attack, or bring weapons to demonstrations that can impact other citizens, especially police or other agents enforcing standing law. Violent interference will be prosecuted even if praised by The New York Times.

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Long ago Bittinger moved from Chicago to a cheese-based land with Democrats not quite as nefarious as Illinois’. He misses proximity to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the occasional good White Sox game, but enjoys writing for JKN’s savvy subscribers and re-reading “A Confederacy of Dunces.”