Ryan Rogers
I did not know Ryan Rogers. I’ve never met his family. He lived over 1300 miles away from me.
For all of my ignorance of who Ryan was, I know one thing: That picture above is of a beautiful, sweet boy.
That beautiful sweet boy was murdered on the night of November 15, just a few weeks ago.
He was riding his bike. In what local police are calling a “random act” which seems to mean there was no apparent cause or motive, a homeless man from Miami decided to brutally murder this innocent boy.
Can you imagine Ryan’s fear? His surprise? His horror and pain? How alone he must have felt? This poor boy. I can’t either. But, I’m brought to tears considering his last moments on earth.
Police tracked down his murderer. There’s little doubt–and let’s dispense with the innocent until proven guilty bullshit for a moment–that Semmie Williams Jr. stabbed Ryan to death and then quickly ditched his body while, for days, Ryan’s family agonized over what had happened to their son, their brother.
Williams has a rap sheet a mile long. No minor drug charges keeping him in prison for decades. No reason for weasel leftists and left libertarians to point out that Williams himself was a victim of “the system” or the “drug war”. He is just a violent perpetrator of the violation of others.
How timely then, that a Twitter war broke out last week when Dave Smith engaged the autistic-libertarian crowd in a back-and-forth about the presence of homeless in parks. He and fellow hero-libertarian Clint Russell devoted time to the issue on Smith’s Part of the Problem podcast.
They stated what is obvious to everyone but the intentionally delusional and comfortably numb theorists: Homeless miscreants who have a penchant for masturbating and defecating in public do not have right to public spaces. They do not have a right to pitch tents under urban highways and throw needles, trash and shit everywhere. And those who want to go off on some on-the-spectrum rant about the illegitimacy of government land and the heinous nature of the war on drugs or the brutality of police: Granted. We know the arguments. We’ve actually read Rothbard and Hoppe and Block. But, all things being equal (ceteris paribus) and given the real conditions in which we currently live, we are dealing with the reality that major urban centers are overrun with homeless encampments and their tenants fear no repercussions from making life for actual residents, unlivable.
Enough with this already. Until something approaching a free and non-totalitarian society and culture emerge, justice demands more than platitudes and excuses for criminals. Get them off of our streets, and if that means knocking some recalcitrant heads around who are threatening the innocent, so be it.
God love, bless and comfort you for eternity, Ryan.
