Small town public disorder

I live in a tiny little Kansas town. There's fewer people here than in a few blocks of one of the neighborhoods where I formerly resided in Brooklyn. I'm from here, but I spent 30 years out and about in big cities. I got used to walking, so I walk around here a lot. Hardly anyone else does. 

You see things walking you don't see from the car.

Last summer, I was walking over to the coffee shop near my house (it's only a couple blocks, but not very appealing blocks. Most of it is through a completely unnecessary parking lot behind a local bank). The coffee shop is on the old part of the Main Street, in buildings built back when they liked density here. But the building on the corner is from the later regime, so unlike the rest of the block, they don't adjoin.

In that little gap, someone planted pine trees at some point. They look nice! They have been there for a while, so they are pretty big. 

Well, one morning, I got to the shop and saw guys out in those trees with chainsaws. They weren't cutting down the trees though. They were just cutting limbs off the trees. The lower limbs. "That's funny," I thought, "But I guess it looks kind of nice, seeing the trunks a little?" 

After getting my coffee I came back outside. The workmen weren't done, but they had cleared more of the fallen limbs out. That's when I saw it: A pinkish blanket basically embedded into the dirt back there. They weren't clearing off the limbs for aesthetic reasons. They were clearing them because they were being used as a makeshift tent, to hide people while they slept on the street. 

This town is a long way from everywhere, but public disorder has reached it.  

I stumbled on a post this morning claiming that public disorder is a big city thing (thanks to a blog post I've linked below).

No, it's not. Remember the federal court case that granted homeless people an affirmative right to sleep in public came out of Boise, Idaho. Boise is a city, but it's a little one. Less than a quarter million — not exactly a megacity.

Public disorder is everywhere now. As LindyMan noted in his newsletter today, most Americans seal themselves off from it in personal vehicles and maybe even gated communities. But that's not going to work forever.

—Brady Dale
October 20, 2026