No One Cared About Jordan Neely's Life. They Just Want to Use His Death | Opinion

One thing I've learned as an adult is that people who actually care about someone don't let them continually fail. Instead, they address that person's problems head-on, because people who care actually want you to succeed, and success often requires course correction.

Progressives are currently beset by a sick reversal of that, where no one is willing to address the root problems of the people they claim to care about, because the people who are failing in our society are more suitable as political pawns and social commodities to exploit for attention and donations.

Instead of addressing real problems like mental illness, violence, crime, and homelessness, progressives are normalizing these things, gaslighting people who call them out as unacceptable, and denouncing any attempts to truly rectify the problems that have our cities in a stranglehold. And they do it all in the name of compassion.

This phenomenon has been on full display in the Left's response to the sad killing of Jordan Neely this week. Neely was a homeless man with a long history of arrests who was suffering from extreme mental illness. Neely tragically died while being restrained in a chokehold by a passenger on the subway after Neely was aggressively screaming at passengers, per witnesses.

The story is horribly sad. Everyone seems to have failed Jordan Neely, as well as everyone in that subway car with him. But the incident has brought out the gross hypocrisy of those who claim to care about the indigent, with a detail to satisfy every political appetite.

Jordan is a Black man who was killed via chokehold by a white man, so let's bring out the term "lynching," because it'll always elicit racial animosity. If the racial angle doesn't work for you, you can always use Jordan's death to show the world how much of a do-gooder you are by exclaiming how the "unhoused" have a right to scream as much they want in an enclosed space. You get to wag your finger at the three men who refused to participate in the New York City tradition of keeping your head down, pretending these people don't exist, and praying that you don't become their target. And you get to accuse those who don't decry those men loudly enough of condoning murder.

Let's be real: These people don't care about the homeless. The upper-class city dwellers of New York treat homeless people like bears in the wild: Don't make eye contact with them and they won't bother you. When this strategy doesn't work, they gaslight you into accepting rampant squalor as not only normal but progress! And when you vocalize your guttural displeasure with watching people live in filth and desperation, the self-appointed homeless-whisperers will manipulate you into believing this is just what city life is supposed to look like.

They do everything to avoid addressing the issue and helping people recover a normal life. And in so doing, they entrench the problems—all while posturing as white knights.

New Yorkers are supposed to just accept that New York's Penn Station looks like a scene from "The Walking Dead." Wanting to do something other than accept the status quo of submitting an entire train station to drug addiction and suffering makes you intolerant, per the Left.

Progressive politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Jamaal Bowman will fire off a tweet about "another Black man dying" or complain about rising rents, but it's just a precursor to drafting up a new round of donor emails, much like after the death of Tyre Nichols.

You know what they say: Never let a crisis go to waste.

Never mind that Ocasio-Cortez and Bowman could actually do something about homelessness in New York. It's actually their job!

But to do something, they would have to actually care. And you know they don't care because they don't act, and anyone who suggests they should is cast as a heartless bigot.

Everyone is debating when someone can or can't use a chokehold. But no one is willing to ask why Neely was on the streets in the first place. The Left's supposedly compassionate approach of letting the homeless just exist means not ever really contemplating what we've let this city become. We've been trained to not look at the homeless as people but as inconvenient rats whom we need to quickly scurry past. They didn't just one day wake up at the feet of your subway station's stairs, but no one cares how they ended up at the bottom—as long as their bottom doesn't interfere with their walking path.

If any of these protesting progressives cared about Jordan Neely, they would care to understand his declining mental health after his mother was murdered and stuffed into a suitcase by his stepfather when he was 18 years old. They would attempt to empathize with the trauma of having to take the stand against the man with whom he shared a home with and comprehend how his own stepfather took the most important woman in his life from him forever.

The man who went through that needed help. He needed an intervention from the state.

Instead of admitting this, they brandish videos of Neely dancing like Michael Jackson in subway stations, as if this activity is a sign of success and happiness, not desperation and struggle.

Would you tell your highly talented friend that dancing in the subway will get them far? Of course not—but it's suitable for Neely because they don't really care.

If you want to know if someone cares, they'll be honest about what is happening around them and want realistic change. They won't pretend that everything is fine. They won't work extraordinarily hard to convince you that depravity is normality.

But I don't think most people actually care about Jordan Neely's life. They just care about what his death can do for them.

Adam B. Coleman is the author of "Black Victim To Black Victor" and writer on Substack at adambcoleman.substack.com.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.