Guard Deployments Should Only be The Beginning
A truly great country cannot afford to have its great public spaces become nodes of lawlessness and filth.
Tail Gunner Joe is a former Publius Fellow and writer based in the Washington, D.C. area.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily align with those of The American Postliberal.
Laughter, scoffs, and eyerolls. That was the reaction to Tucker Carlson’s reporting from Moscow, Russia last February.
However, Carlson’s footage of the spotless Moscow subway system and the “lack of booze-drenched hobos” throughout the public transportation system was markedly different from the average commuter experience throughout America. This year, President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Washington D.C. has transformed not just Union Station, but the city itself.
The thugs, crackheads, and vagrants pissing in the corner on Metro cars are gone. Tourists and young families can walk the streets of our nation’s capital unmolested for the first time in years. Which begs the question, how can a heavily sanctioned, internationally isolated pariah state in Russia keep public transport safe without deploying the military? The answer comes down to culture and values that are upheld by the state for the common good of the people.
Singapore offers what this author thinks is the answer. It comes down to what former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew (often referred to as LKY) referred to as “First World behaviors.” These behaviors are embodied in the story of Singapore’s rise from backwater fishing village into one of the richest countries on Earth.
Today, it boasts a home ownership rate of 90%, and is widely known for low crime rates and a strong emphasis on public order and cleanliness. These accomplishments are even more impressive when you consider that Singapore possesses almost no natural resources or hinterland.
Values and culture, both of which were crafted and enforced by Singapore’s first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, are the reason why Singapore enjoys the prosperity that it does today. President Trump’s boldness in enforcing order over the heads of incompetent city mayors who oversee third-world levels of violencein their cities parallels LKY’s creation of the Singapore of today.
Like LKY, President Trump understands that making America Great Again means establishing a baseline of peace and basic cleanliness within urban spaces, quite literally the public square, to make a country’s great cities to be appealing to its residents and visitors. A country cannot be great if it allows filth to cover the sidewalks and criminals to stalk the streets.
LKY recognized that if his country were to survive, it would need to become an attractive destination for investment from wealthier countries. To attract this investment, LKY knew he had to make Singapore personally appealing for Westerners to visit. “Getting the population that has been behaving like a third world to start behaving like the first world,” was the hardest obstacle LKY encountered in his quest to bring prosperity to his country, regardless of how many houses or schools the state built or how many corporations he attracted to the country.
“We built up the infrastructure…The difficult part was getting the people to change their habits so that they behaved…not like third world citizens spitting and littering all over the place”, LKY remarked to the New York Times in 2007.
The Singaporean government would run monthly campaigns with the goal of eliminating behavior like public urination, spitting, open air drug use, and littering. Those that continued to defy these campaigns were first fined by the police and, if necessary, jailed by the authorities.
LKY understood that to build a wealthy country from nothing, he would need to create a culture of meritocracy and discipline, a “rugged society” that placed social harmony and self-reliance over rampant individualism. This culture meant that everyone was responsible for the common good of public spaces, down to the most mundane locations like public restrooms.
Public restrooms in American cities are largely avoided due to health and safety hazards. That’s not the case in Singapore. The 2010 campaign, Let’s Observe Ourselves (LOO), launched by the Restroom Association (Singapore) (RAS) in conjunction with the Singapore Tourism Board aimed to have 70% of the 30,000 public restrooms in the country achieve a three-star rating for cleanliness.
The criteria for this rating system analyzed whether the public restroom is clean, lacking in odor and litter, and has fully functional amenities. This is very much the bare minimum for Singapore. RAS President Tan Puay Hoon remarked at the time, “For us, toilet etiquette reflects Singapore’s culture. It tells people how civilized we are…We are a First World country, and we want a gracious society to reflect that.”
Think of the last time you used a public restroom in a major American metropolitan area. The experience is night and day.
Americans gaze upon Singapore’s stuffy orderliness and scoff. The police detaining an American citizen for littering, noise nuisances, or general rudeness would be seen as overzealous at best and unconstitutional at the worst. Yet America today is oddly like Singapore during its rise. It boasts considerable wealth, but Americans in our great cities expect and are confronted with third-world behavior and violence daily.
LKY painted a picture of early Singapore where “the unemployed…would sell on the pavements and streets in total disregard of traffic. The resulting litter and dirt, the stench of rotting food, and the clutter and obstructions turned…the city into a slum.”
Any tourist or commuter in New York City knows that this description would also be apt for certain parts of the city. Dead bodies, stabbings, gropers, arsonists and unhinged lunatics like Jordan Neely are regular occurrences on public transit throughout the city.
In Washington D.C., feces, used condoms, and urine regularly cover the platforms at transit stations and the trains themselves. San Francisco has become such a bastion of third-world behavior that an interactive “poop map” was created to track the amount of feces across the city.
Yet these cities are also home to Fortune 500 companies, multimillionaires, and provide Americans with prestigious educational opportunities alongside the highest cost of living in the entire country.
Contrast the pride that Singaporeans have for their spotless metropolis and the forced indifference of the American city-dweller. The Singaporean government’s championing of first-world values and actual enforcement of those values has made Singapore, quite literally, a shining city on a hill.
Citizens take pride in cleanliness, public order, and the subsequent prosperity that follows championing those values. American commuters stare off into the abyss as criminals murder innocents like Iryna Zarutska and smile through gritted teeth that violent murders are just another part of living in an American city.
America still is the envy of most of the third world on Earth, yet our cities champion third world values in the public square. Instead of a “first world oasis in a third-world region” as LKY described his vision for Singapore, the quality of America’s public spaces is usually set by the lowest common denominator: the criminals, the drug-addicted, and the violently mentally ill that roam the urban landscape.
President Trump has begun to reverse this creep of third-world values throughout American cities. The Trump Administration should also launch public cleanliness campaigns, similar to LKY’s 1979 National Courtesy Campaign and the 2010 LOO effort. Not only were LKY’s campaigns about attracting more tourists, but they aimed to increase the quality of life of residents.
Targeting Democratic-controlled cities with these courtesy campaigns will also provide President Trump the ability to pair law-and-order messaging with the National Guard alongside efforts to beautify and physically clean up cities that the Left have allowed to decay.
A truly great country cannot afford to have its great public spaces become nodes of lawlessness and filth. The National Guard has helped push down crime rates in D.C., proving that yes, the President can “just do things” to halt America’s quality of life decline.
If Lee Kuan Yew was able to transform Singapore into a spotless municipality from a mud hut backwater, then America can rediscover a time in our history where our public spaces were the envy of the world under President Trump’s leadership.
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