July 12, 2012

“Exactly”! Nothing’s changed! Nothing ever changes! In the permanent-victim mentality, there is no passage of time. To the Palestinian refugee brooding in his camp, it’s always 1948. To the black American “community organizer,” it’s always Jim Crow. The decades flit by unnoticed.

Speaking of community organizers, wasn’t Chicago’s black community thoroughly organized years ago by that guy…what’s his name?…oh, never mind.

To the main issue, though: What’s to be done about all these killings? Brother Ballentine again:

If you want to stop all this violence, it’s easy: You get economic empowerment into these poverty-strucken [sic] communities. Give these young people a chance to work. Give them jobs.

Wow! How come nobody ever thought of that? Somebody (Who? The government? Big corporations? Korean storekeepers? Warren Buffett? Me?) has this stash of jobs that for some reason”€”racism, most likely”€”they are withholding from Chicago’s poor. We (they, you, him) should give them those jobs.

Perhaps we should, at the same time, stop giving jobs to illegal aliens and to the 100,000 or so immigrants who settle lawfully in the USA every month. That, however, would upset the Congressional Black Caucus, who, judging from their votes on immigration issues, might as well be Mexicans.

It’s not only a Chicago problem, either. New York City has, according to the New York Post, been enduring a Summer of Blood.

The Big Apple just kept getting bloodier yesterday, with at least eight more people struck by gunfire”€”three fatally”€”as NYPD statistics revealed a jaw-dropping jump in shootings over last year….Year to date, 880 people have been shot in the city, compared with 803 for the same span in 2011….

New York City’s Police Commissioner tells us that “Ninety-six percent of our shooting victims are people of color.” The occasional name to appear in newspaper arrest reports suggests that the same is true of the shooters. As in Chicago, it’s NAMs killing NAMs.

So what’s going on here? Is it the heat? Not likely.

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg, in his book about the great Chicago heat wave of 1995, notes that while crime goes up in summer because the heat drives people outdoors, “€œwhen the heat becomes too extreme, crime rates actually decrease because would-be criminals become too lethargic to engage in crime.”€

The most popular explanations for New York’s surge are reductions in police numbers, emasculation of the stern Rockefeller drug laws, and turn-‘em-loose left-liberal judges.

Dull, unimaginative stuff”€”about what you’d expect from the nation’s commercial capital, a city of storekeepers. Out there under the broad skies of the Midwest where the imagination can soar, people know the truth: It’s the fault of those darn Pilgrims!

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

 

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