When my cat Buttons wants my attention he likes to touch the tips of his teeth to my skin. Sharp pointy little teeth. It tickles actually. Now suppose I’m wanting to do something else right then … am I to blame for the tickling because I put my feet where he can reach them?
Now, the People in question are not like cats, there isn’t some inescapable nature of being a “black person”. There isn’t something “black” about what is happening in Chicago … simply, the color of a Person’s skin tells you nothing of importance about who they are, what they believe, or the sort of character they have. People don’t inherit suffering or guilt. And there isn’t anything about just being poor that makes crime so bad or else when Americans were really poor it would have been a war zone everywhere … even in that same community among people who are equally poor and of similar ages you will certainly find individuals who wouldn’t steal bubble gum.
The fault is not in the stars of those who see no issues engaging in petty crimes (let’s leave out serious crimes) but in themselves.
All across the land you’ll find people of all stripes who are as honest as the day is long just as you’ll find individuals whose choices and excuses has helped them grow into anything but … there are even honest lawyers … or so I’m occasionally reminded (must vary inversely from the distance to the nearest Capitol building though).
So what is wrong?
Philosophy. Ideology. These seem likely contributors.
It seems to me that all the real opposition of society that blacks had faced never did enough to make even the criminal element, present in all groups, particularly different than any other criminal element of any other demographic bunch you might care to name.
But borrowing from Scripture what might be called a root of bitterness took hold and combined with Left wing notions of power and class struggles created a sort of radical that once joined with the criminal element just made for something worse than either on it’s own and that the transition point seems to have been about the time a relatively small number of angry black people first burned down their own communities (decades after the last time some angry white mob outright burned down a black community).
For the most part criminals of all demographics seem to do their thing close to home. They prey upon their neighbors. What happens in a place like Chicago is on that level no different than what happens in Dallas or Abilene. But there has to be some special sort of hopelessness that takes hold once your neighbors seem willing to proverbially (if not literally) burn down your neighborhood, their neighborhood. How do you plan for a better tomorrow if that’s ever gone on?
And I think that’s what really separates a proverbial Chicago out. It isn’t that there’s an astonishing lot of criminals about (as one Detroit cop was to have said, virtually all crime is due to just a few thousand individuals out of hundreds of thousands) but that there’s a mailiase, a resignment and heartbreak too among all the honest folks.
They don’t even have to share one jot in whatever ideological poisons that may grip the criminals and many likely don’t. Their kids are being lured into often shortened lives of crime on the streets by the same gangs that seek to poison and rob the rest. How could heartbreak not be part of it? So everything falls apart and it just keeps on falling apart.
But, hey, to pull a Mr. Mackey: “Liburals are bad. Mmm-Kay? And white liburals are really bad. Mmm-Kay?” since that’s so much easier a rhetoric.