Sitting around talking and reading, my wife turns on the TV to catch the local weather; much too early, unfortunately. A segment comes on featuring the latest installment of the endless Kabuki theater that is the liberal approach to combating street violence in our "inner cities".
Chicago's new mayor, Rahm Emanuel, wants to "take back the streets", yada, yada, yada. So will he combat the astounding teen pregnancy rate, which will place yet another generation of very-lightly-reared and poorly-educated young black males on the streets, exactly the demographic causing today's violence? Will he criticize the "gangsta rap" culture, so pervasive in black neighborhoods, that glorifies and romanticizes criminal behavior and is peddled by rich liberal media executives? Will he arrest more bad guys and pressure liberal local judges to keep them in jail longer? Will he lay off the legions of useless extra workers at the core of the Chicago Democrat party patronage system and channel the savings to hire more police to better patrol the streets? Uhhh ....... Nah.
Emanuel did the only thing Democrats know how to do well, their only trick, other than railing against guns, in their intellectually-exhausted playbook -- he held a street demonstration. Through a dangerous black neighborhood he led yet one more of the innumerable "take back the streets" marches we've seen over and over again for decades. That's their solution -- hold a demonstration, as if such will have the remotest effect on violent gang-bangers, and rail against guns, as if city kids aren't also killing each other with knives, bats, and fists, and as if white and east Asian kids across the country are also killing each other with remotely the same frequency with the guns, knives, and baseball bats to which they too have access.
Most major northern American cities have been run for a couple of generations by liberals, and they have made quite a mess of it. They've earned a fat "F" in social policy, but give them credit where credit is due -- they deserve an "A" in street demonstrations, their cynically-hollow and useless gestures that can sure draw TV cameras and whip up a crowd.
John M Greco