Freddie deBoer wrote something last week that I just caught up to today and it’s so excellent I wanted to make sure others saw it as well.

I often find myself in agreement with deBoer despite the fact that he’s pretty far to the left on a lot of issues. What he’s not is an ideologue. That is to say, he has his views of what he wants the future to look like, views that are different from mine, but he doesn’t live in the woke fantasy land where wishing makes things so. He remains grounded in a world I recognize as reality. And he often is able to express that difference better than just about anyone else. This particular essay was a response to a New Yorker article critical of adoption but you don’t need to read it to appreciate deBoer’s response.

I’ve mentioned a few times in the past that I spent a couple school years working in my hometown’s public school district. I spent the bulk of that time as a paraprofessional in a program for students with severe emotional disturbance. The program was housed in a regular K-5 public school but separate from the regular classrooms, though a handful of the higher-functioning students were partially mainstreamed. I quit at the end of the school year. I had grad school to go to, but even if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have kept going. The job was just too emotionally punishing. A lot of these kids were, at 8 or 9 or 10 years old, damaged in profound and debilitating ways. They self-harmed; they attempted to harm their peers; they would on rare occasions become so agitated and destructive that they had to be sent off in an ambulance…

In one incident, a kid became frustrated with his math assignment and without warning took hold of his big fake gold “G-Unit” medallion and started striking himself in the face with it. I was only a few paces away, but before I could stop him he had already opened up a large gash on his eyebrow, requiring a hospital visit.

So you get the idea. These were very troubled kids and in some cases the only thing between them doing serious harm to themselves and others was the immediate physical restraint by adults. But this type of last-ditch intervention was considered unacceptable by some academics in the field who considered verbal de-escalation the only acceptable response. At some point in grad school deBoer encountered one of these folks at a conference on special education. When he pointed out, based on his actual experience, that some kids were violent and at least in that moment incapable of talking about alternatives, the panelist just kept repeating that verbal de-escalation was the only acceptable approach.

There was simply no bridging the divide. My perspective was informed by the understanding that children, including children who were typically harmless and sweet, could be capable of acts of unprovoked and sudden violence. That understanding was the product of experience. But my experience was no match for her sunny, uncompromising, willfully ignorant commitment to the idea that children could always be talked down, could always be relied on to be subject to rational appeal. I gave up the line of questioning. I could see that there was no force on earth that could pierce the armor of her convictions. She wanted it to be true, and so it was.

Do you recognize the type? Woke Twitter mobs are full of these people. Defund the police was pushed by these people who were confident a utopia was only one budget slashing away. Most of them seem to regret it now but it’s not clear anything has actually been learned. They just move on to the next ideological battle, no less certain of themselves than they were before. They seem constitutionally incapable of admitting their wisdom might not account for all the actual possibilities in an imperfect world.

Speaking of defunding the police, deBoer himself supports more police and prison reform. He supports ending qualified immunity and the prosecution and firing of more officers. He really is a progressive on these issues. And yet, he ends his piece with another story about a family who lives upstairs in his building. The woman and her child live in an apartment with her mother and grandmother. The problem is her violent abusive boyfriend. He shows up and they begin screaming or crying or breaking things. People have called the landlord and the police and the young woman has vowed many times never to see him again. But he always returns and the shouting and violence start up again.

Until recently when things got better for that family and everyone living near them. Why? Because, “he got put in jail, apparently for beating her up…You don’t hear her or her mother constantly crying anymore.”

When I was just married, back in the 90s, my wife and I lived in a crummy rental in Virginia next to a couple that were constantly fighting. We would hear him screaming at his wife and then we’d hear her crying. It was a horrible experience for her obviously but also for us on the other side of the thin walls. From what we heard we were certain he was beating her. Eventually we spoke to neighbors and we called the police. They did come but nothing ever seemed to happen to him. But I don’t regret making the call. If nothing else maybe it set up a track record police and prosecutors could refer to later on. We left that place not long after so I never found out.

But just like the academic on the special education panel who said physical restraint was never acceptable, there are progressives who believe calling the police is never acceptable. They are ideologues who aren’t living in the real world. Sometimes calling the police is the very best thing that can happen. Sometimes failing to call the police is the very worst thing that can happen. But the ideologues would rather see people harmed and even dead than admit their particular wisdom doesn’t always result in good outcomes.