I rarely struggle to find something to write about. My normal problem is having so many subjects that I want to comment on, I can’t settle on just one. That’s what is happening to me right now, so I guess I’ll just make this a rant and get out some of the things going through my mind as best I can.
I used to take solace in knowing that I hadn’t attended the funeral of a lot of young people. What has changed is that I am now learning of their deaths, not just through the newspapers but because a number of them were related to my Facebook friends.
Those young people have been shot. They’ve been killed in car rollover crashes. They’ve been visiting here and murdered — senselessly. In a world where social media dominates, relatives are posting their pain online and it has to mean more than me sympathizing by “Liking” what they said.
How do we, as a people and as a society, stop the downward spiral that many of us see occurring before our very eyes? From “Black Lives Matter” to “Cop Lives Matter” to “All Lives Matter” to just “Lives,” what is the path of least resistance to get there? Right now we are living in a time where personal selfishness is the priority. People want to do what they want to do and everyone else be — damned. That is the major part of the problem. We are living in a society where rules don’t matter and everyone can do what they want, when they want and how they want.
I wish I had the solution as to how we recover from such a mindset. But I don’t. Right now, Chicago and the rest of the world are basically going to hell in the proverbial handbasket. Lawlessness is now at the forefront. How can we, as American citizens, abide by the laws when we see our politicians making excuses for the millions of people who are here illegally? Those politicians have come up with every excuse in the world except for the one that says “wrong is wrong” while at the same time holding American citizens to the letter of the law.
But it’s more than just the politicians. The truth is we voted for them by either casting our vote or staying home. As I watch the news, the last of the mayor’s budget hearings is over, yet I wonder where all that passion, now flowing from certain individuals’ mouths, was when he was running for re-election? We have a city with a declining factory base and that land is being repurposed for uses that don’t bring in the kind of money that a factory once did.
Want to know another reason why we are losing money in this city? There is, as of late, a propensity for the city to take entire blocks for police stations and their parking lots. All the tax dollars that used to come in from businesses occupying that land has been passed on to the taxpayer. Every new school built where a business once stood is in a location where revenue is no longer being generated. And if the mayor’s huge tax increase goes through, we will see Chicago’s poor and the struggling working class pushed further and further out the door.
Oh, how I wish I knew the answers.
