Utopian Dystopia

Utopian dystopia

Finis coronat opus.
The end crowns the work. — Ovid, Heroides 2.85

Rome admired the finisher, not the dreamer.
They built aqueducts, bridges, roads that still stand. They measured virtue by results, not slogans.

If Ovid could walk through an American city today, he would see the opposite.
We are ruled by dreamers who never finish anything.
Leaders who confuse mercy with weakness, and compassion with cowardice.
They build no aqueducts, only excuses.

Every major city now looks like a failed experiment that no one wants to admit failed.
Streets packed with needles and tents.
Shops boarded up.
The honest man afraid to walk after dark, while the thief is treated like a misunderstood victim.

It did not happen overnight.
It started with good intentions and no courage.
They said prison was cruel, so they emptied it.
They said drugs were a disease, not a crime, so they legalized them.
They said policing was oppressive, so they stopped enforcing the law.

And the result was exactly what Rome would have predicted.

When the strong protect the wicked instead of the innocent, the city rots.
When the law excuses instead of punishes, men stop fearing consequence.
And when men stop fearing consequence, civilization begins to unravel.

Intentions do not matter. Outcomes do.
The end crowns the work.

And the end of all these soft experiments is visible now in every ruined downtown.
Empty stores.
Graffiti on every wall.
Addicts sprawled across sidewalks while politicians hold press conferences about equity.

The same people who lecture the rest of us about “justice” live behind gates and private security.
Their mercy costs nothing because someone else pays for it.
The shop owner. The commuter. The bus driver. The mother walking her kids home.
All of them left to live with the consequences of other people’s compassion.

Rome understood that mercy without order is cruelty.
A state that cannot punish evil will eventually punish innocence instead.
The criminal roams free while the citizen hides.

And the great irony is that the ones who preach “love” the loudest seem to despise the law most.
But love without law is chaos.
Grace without discipline is decay.

Every society eventually has to choose between justice and collapse.
Rome chose justice and lasted a thousand years.
We chose feelings, and we will be lucky to last a century.

I drive through these cities sometimes for work and feel the same heaviness every time.
Good men living small, quiet lives surrounded by failure.
People locking their doors at red lights.
Parents teaching their children not to make eye contact.
And still, the leaders talk about “progress.”

Progress toward what?

A city that apologizes to its criminals and lectures its citizens is not humane.
It is suicidal.

You can measure the moral health of a society by who it pities.
Rome pitied the builder.
We pity the destroyer.
Rome honored the man who completed his duty.
We glorify the man who excuses his failures.

The end crowns the work.
And the work of modern America is not noble.

We are reaping the harvest of decades of cowardice.
Of prosecutors who refuse to prosecute.
Of judges who call evil “trauma.”
Of leaders who mistake pandering for compassion.

It will not end in utopia.
It will end, as it always does, in blood and regret.

The dreamers will vanish when the work collapses.
And the finishers will have to rebuild from the ashes, as they always do.

The end crowns the work.
And this work is ending badly.