Joe Soucheray: Reckless car thieves, streetlamp wreckers … we’re tired of this

Joe Soucheray
·3 min read
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We have too many troubled feral youths with a strong affinity for stealing cars and vandalizing streetlamps. They know about tools, and if that is too gracious, they are not afraid to roll up their sleeves and tackle electrical systems that would have most of us calling an electrician.

You’re aiming too low, fellows. You steal cars for no other reason than to run a nefarious errand and then you dump it and steal another one. You’ve got a couple of problems. One, you don’t know how to drive. Every report of a stolen car that comes along contains the inevitable paragraph where we learn the driver crashed into a tree or rolled into a pond.

Any 5-year-old kid raised on a farm can drive better than you urban louts. Aren’t you embarrassed? No, really, you don’t have a clue, making you much more dangerous. You have no concept of speed, braking or turning. You are complete morons and we are tired of it.

The next time you steal somebody’s Hyundai, leave it in one piece. You also have no idea what insurance costs.

And speaking of Hyundais and Kias, too, I suppose, I am not going to blame the manufacturers for your temptations. We have elected a political class that believes that Hyundai and Kia purposely designed cars to be easily stolen in the Twin Cities. They did not. Criminals steal cars. Criminals have tools and they can surf Google. There is not a doubt in my mind that these same drifters could just as easily steal Porsches and Jaguars, but it would take a bit longer so they go after the low-hanging fruit.

You should be ashamed of yourselves, fellas, for the way you have embarrassed the moonshiners, main-street drag racers, low riders and dirt-track racers, all of us for that matter. You don’t know a damn thing about cars.

Don’t know if it’s the same crowd, but it’s the same lazy ideology when it comes to streetlights. All you do is leave behind a pitiable mess. For what? How many “help wanted” signs do you pass on your way to the next $7 score of copper wire?

We have old beautiful streetlamps in St. Paul. They cast a civic twilight glow. The ones still working. They speak to a day of better beggars and thieves. By day, the broken ones offer sprung access panels and strands of wire having been snipped. Now that street is dark and restless.

Any day now, the St. Paul City Council, the least diverse city council in America, all young females with the same liberal world view, will probably get around to blaming the manufacturer of the pole for placing the access panel too near the ground. Why, they should have envisioned the misunderstood youth when they designed those lamps.

For cars, buy a standard transmission vehicle while they still last. The thief wouldn’t get 10 feet if he had to work a clutch.

And even if he could use a clutch, he’d probably crash into a streetlamp, knocking another one out of service.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

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