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A Weekend of Mayhem


Chicago, once again this year, was not celebrating Father’s Day.  And, a bit of good news, no one in Chicago -- which the poet Carl Sandburg called “the City of the Big Shoulders” – has yet suggested that the Chicago Police Department should be defunded.

The Chicago Sun Times reported over the weekend in banner headlines, “60 shot, 9 fatally, so far this weekend in Chicago: “Nine people have been killed, four of them minors, and 51 others have been wounded in shootings across Chicago so far this weekend.”

The details are not uplifting. One of the victims, a 13 year old girl, “was inside a home about 8:30 p.m. in the 1000 block of North LeClaire Avenue when the shots were fired, and she was struck in the neck, Chicago police said. She was taken to Stroger Hospital, where she was pronounced dead…

“Two boys, 15 and 16, were sitting on a porch when one of them noticed a red laser pointing at him and heard gunfire, police said. The younger boy was struck in the back and the older boy was struck in the leg. They were taken to Mount Sinai Hospital in good condition.

“A 3-year-old boy was fatally wounded about two hours earlier when someone opened fire at his father while they were driving in Austin,” a suburb of Chicago.

This is not new-news. Chicago, in areas where fatherhood in marriage is a consummation devoutly to be wished and kids shoot other kids with guns that magically have slipped through the tightest gun restriction net in the country, has become used to this sort of thing. A weekend in which less than 20 Chicago victims, the vast majority of them African Americans, are shot would surprise the socks off most U.S. politicians who now regard mayhem in Chicago as a tolerable nuisance. These are the black lives that do NOT matter.

Not everyone is so blasé about social disintegrations in the “city of the big shoulders,” so called by Sandberg because Chicago was, long ago in the day, a city of industrial workers. One commentator noted the numbers may be off: “I couldn’t help but notice the specific chosen verbiage in the CST’s tease-line: ‘60 shot, 9 fatally, SO FAR THIS weekend in Chicago.’” The story appeared on Sunday at 7:08am CDT, allowing 17 more hours before the weekend bloodletting would be tucked into bed.

The war on statues continues apace. In San Francisco, the Daily Mail tells us, “anti-racism protesters ripped down statues of Ulysses S. Grant and Francis Scott Key,” who wrote the lyrics for the American national anthem "The Star-Spangled Banner”. Grant was, of course, the general chosen by President Abraham Lincoln to prosecute a bloody war against slaveholding interests in the South.

One might easily imagine the Black Lives Matter protestors taking the anti-Grant idiots to the woodshed, but it turns out that Grant’s wife’s family had slaves, as had George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and many other below the Mason-Dixon Line southerners before Lincoln said, in his second inaugural address, words engraved on the wall of the Lincoln Memorial, also desecrated: “Fondly do we hope -- fervently do we pray -- that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether."

And over in Merry England, largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters, who earlier had pelted largely peaceful police with missiles, turned their attention to Winston Churchill, who first battled the fascists in a hot war and later the Stalinists in a cold war, both totalitarian cults that used state sanctioned mob violence to subdue a natural ethical order that once formed the spine of the liberty loving free world. The message Stalin sent to the world was simple: “No man, no problem.” We thought violent destructive brown-shirt mobs had been eradicated after World War II. Alas, the violent history-hating mobs are with us still. Their message is laughably absurd: No statue, no problem.

Here and there, light and intelligence penetrates darkening gloom. In Texas, after protestors stopped traffic on the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, African American Police Chief Renee Hall arrested six hundred seventy-four obstructionists and offered the opposite of an apology for what she had done. "There are many who question and are not happy with the decisions that I made on yesterday," she said. "Let me be clear, I am not here to make people happy. My job and our job in law enforcement is to keep this city safe. We have pledged that. We will do that. And that is our goal."


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