It’s been a while since I wrote about Chicago, and I have to admit that unlike the feeling of schadenfreude that come over me when I contemplate the ruins of once-fine cities like San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Portland and Boston, there is a slight twinge of sadness when I see the Second City also trembling on the edge of the abyss as its civic fabric unravels.
Reader Brad_In_IL however, despite being a near-denizen of same, has no such compunction, and shares this article by the great John Kass:
It is a woman’s scream, a real scream of fear that was randomly captured the other day on a Ring doorbell security camera as she was attacked, pulled to the ground, and robbed by thugs as she walked on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in Chicago’s “mostly peaceful” and leafy Lakeview* neighborhood.
Within that scream of terror hides another, buried sound, part of what the writer Matt Rosenberg, senior editor at wirepoints.org, brilliantly calls “the great unraveling.”
It is the sigh of a once-great but thoroughly exhausted city, a Chicago bone-tired, spent by decades of political corruption, hammered by the brutal application of race card politics in a city of tribes, and in 2020 Lightfoot’s City Hall failed miserably to stop the riots and looting that grew out of the George Floyd protests, and then Lightfoot endorsed the Soros-backed State’s Attorney Kim Foxx for re-election.
It is a city drained by street gang violence and political indifference, where police have been weakened and demoralized, even as private security forces crop up, paid for by those with means who demand protection. In this, Chicago is like Rome.
*Lakeview, for those who may have forgotten, was where I used to live and it was beautiful, safe and home to about four dozen (non-chain) restaurants within three blocks’ walk from our apartment. I loved living there, and left only because of pressing family commitments.
You should read the whole of Kass’s brilliantly-written article, because it is depressingly similar to the horror shows of America’s other metropolises, and shares many of the governmental sins that are endemic to any place run by today’s Democrats.
I say “today’s Democrats” because no matter his faults, I absolutely cannot imagine that former Mayor Richard M. Daley would have tolerated today’s carnage — and his father, Richard J. Daley (of ’68 Democrat Convention fame) would have reacted even more violently.
Oh well… sic transit and all that.
