Sunday, January 03, 2010

Joys of Chicago

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3 comments:

Arelcao Akleos said...

One summer in Chicago, to supplement the income made by cooking in the evenings, I worked at the CRL ["Center for Research Libraries"] on a part-time basis. There was a pretty black girl who worked there, as an assistant, and came in one day hysterical, both weeping and raging. It turned out that her brother had been murdered, knifed to death, by two guys on the South Side, just south of the the University, because he had resisted letting them steal his Nikes. They had pled guilty to 2nd degree murder. She thought they had been put away for many years. But walking to work that morning she had seen one of the killers walking free, and he had recognized her and taunted her about her brother's death.
We found out later that he was the younger of the two murderers, and as part of the plea bargaining had been slotted as a juvenile not an adult. Upon reaching 18, released. His "juvenile" criminal record hidden.
What I remember most clearly was that her rage was primarily directed against the "justice" system, the state and the courts. The poor girl was furious at her brothers death being of such little weight to "the system". . She felt, correctly, completely betrayed.
Chicago had many elements of a great city, then. The museums were extraordinary and were cheap or free, no one left out for reasons of money. The parks were beautiful. The culture available superb. All, without exception, institutions that had been created at the end of the 19th Century, under the aegis of the "Burnham" plan.
It also had huge and awful doses of complete barbarism; where death, and pain, and destruction were exalted or at least taken as mundane. These were, again without exception, created in the cauldron of post WWII social engineering and the tribalistic polits of the Daley Machine;Federal and local government conspiring, for their own agendas, to create the vast public housing projects, to bring under governmental control all the race and other social issues the city faced, and to bind the economy of the city--often in full cooperation with organized crime-- to the political control of the Democrat Party.
"Cabrini Green and Tony the Tuna too" might as well have been the credo of Chicago in the 1980s.
Today, Chicago has lost much of that residual city of Burnham's vision, and the Barbarity has deepened and spread all parts. Whether you are a school child, or a couple walking down Roosevelt, or a prim liberal professor leaving the Buddhist center early one morning, there is no escaping it.
This century is going to be a tragedy for this nation, and Chicago is leading the way.

1/03/2010 3:35 AM
Mr roT said...

Huckabee laughed out loud.

1/03/2010 5:05 AM
Tecumseh said...

I've only been once to Chicago, hanging around that cement tower monstrosity at UIC. Had some good food at a nearby Greek restaurant. Did not see much of the city, but the view from the elevated subway, going back to O'Hare, was abysmal.

At any rate, poor girl, being slashed like that. The system let her down, big time. Shocka!

1/03/2010 10:32 AM

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