The traffic light turns red in Harris County, Texas. As the cars come to a halt, a man walks into the intersection, weaving between the bumpers, holding a cardboard sign. The drivers lock their doors. They look away. They are filled with a toxic and confusing cocktail of emotions: pity, annoyance, and a low, simmering fear. This small, daily scene of disorder is the first broken window of a civilization. One county commissioner, hearing the complaints of his citizens, proposes a simple act of order: a ban on panhandling in the dangerous medians, coupled with designated safe zones for charity. But another official, with a heart full of compassion, objects. He worries about the overcrowded jail. He worries about the plight of the "unhoused." He argues for a form of inaction, for a tolerance born of pity.

This is not a small debate. This is the choice between two futures.

To understand the stakes, we must first look away from the man in the intersection and look to the silent, invisible victim of this debate: the law-abiding poor. The well-intentioned commissioner sees the panhandler, but he does not see the single mother who must walk her child through that same intersection every morning, teaching him to avert his eyes. He does not see the elderly woman who is now afraid to go to the corner store. He does not see the immigrant family who runs a small business and must clean up the human waste and the trash left behind each day. These people, who have no voice in the debate, are the ones who are asked to pay the full price for this public display of compassion. Their right to a safe, clean, and orderly community -- the most basic of all common goods -- is being sacrificed on the altar of a sentimental and short-sighted pity.

This is the first lesson of a just society: that a community is a fragile garden, and that the love for the flowers must be accompanied by the courage to pull the weeds. An untended garden is not a place of liberation. It is a place of chaos, where the strongest and most aggressive weeds choke out the light and the air for everyone else.

Now let us look at the end of this road. A man in Johannesburg, South Africa, sits in his home and writes a letter to the world. He does not worry about a man at an intersection. He worries about the criminal gangs that are the only real government in his city. He lives behind high walls and razor wire, a prisoner in his own home. The power grid has failed. The water is unsafe. The police cannot protect him. The city has collapsed into a "war of all against all," a brutal and terrifying reality where the only law is the law of the strong.

How did his city die? It died by a thousand small acts of compassion very much like the one being proposed in Texas. It died when its leaders, for a generation, consistently chose the easy, compassionate-sounding, and short-sighted path over the difficult, disciplined, and far-sighted one. It died when the fear of being called "cruel" became greater than the love for the common good.

The choice before the commissioners in Texas is not about jails or panhandlers. It is a choice about whether to repair the first broken window, or to begin the long and certain journey down the road to a burning city. True love for the poor is not to abandon them to the chaos that a misguided pity creates. It is to have the courage to defend, for them and for all of us, the fragile and beautiful order of a true and common home.