Chicago’s charnel house

On Aug. 2, demonstrators shut down one of the most famous drives in America, Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. The march ended at one of the most famous ballparks in America, Wrigley Field.

The ostensible purpose was to raise awareness of violence in the city’s poorer neighborhoods by inconveniencing citizens living in its wealthier neighborhoods.

Beginning the next day and continuing through the weekend, 74 more people were shot in the Windy City, almost all African American, almost all on the south and west sides of town.

Governments exist first and foremost to provide security for their citizens; thus what is occurring in Chicago is a breakdown of government in the most basic sense. Too many parts of our great cities have become the equivalent of “failed states” where going about mundane daily activities is more dangerous than serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The problem with the protest marches in Chicago, however, is that they blame the wrong parties and thereby absolve the blameworthy ones, which just so happen to include one of the key organizers of those marches, Black Lives Matter.

Black Lives Matter has done everything within its power in recent years to demonize the police officers entrusted with providing security in crime-ridden neighborhoods. To the extent that “de-policing” or the “Ferguson effect” are real, those dangerous trends can be at least partially attributed to leftist accusations of pervasive police brutality and “front to back” racism in our criminal justice system.

Make the police the enemy and the real enemy gets to more easily terrorize its neighbors.

The people who had difficulty getting home from work on Lake Shore Drive or taking their families to the Cubs game that Thursday in Chicago were not the ones who did the killing in the days that followed; the hunch is that most don’t own guns and have never even shot one. They are law-abiding citizens trying to go about their business in peaceful fashion.

But blaming guns (Chicago already has some of the nation’s stiffest gun-control laws), racism, and social injustice for the violence makes it easier to avoid facing up to the real cause, which is that so many young black males are growing up in poor, inner-city neighborhoods without fathers, or at least fathers wed to their mothers.

No one with any familiarity with the scholarly literature would disagree with the claim that boys raised in poor households without fathers are vastly more likely to experience educational failure and become involved in crime. Those feral youth provide a ready reservoir for the gangs that effectively control large swaths of Chicago and other urban areas.

The disintegration of the black family is the greatest social and political calamity of our age. The mass incarceration decried by social justice warriors isn’t the cause of this tragedy but its inevitable consequence. And nothing will ultimately work when it comes to addressing crime in our inner cities unless it begins with that understanding.

Racism didn’t destroy the black family (the black illegitimacy rate in the much more distant and much more racist past was a mere fraction what it is today) and it doesn’t make young black males join urban street gangs and shoot other young black males, either.

The primary culprits in Chicago’s continuing carnage aren’t the folks who live on Lake Shore Drive or up in Wrigleyville but the ones actually doing the drive-by shootings, along with the people (like members of Black Lives Matter) who seek to undermine the ability of the police to stop them.

This politically correct refusal to identify the source of the problem is consequently reflected in the lack of concrete proposals for solving it.

As such, it is far from clear what policies are actually being advocated by the marchers in Chicago. More to the point, it is difficult to understand how disrupting traffic on Lake Shore Drive or obstructing entry to a baseball game is going to put the black family back together again or discourage poor unwed teenage girls from having children they can’t remotely take care of.

And if they have no ideas on that score, no suggestions for how to alter the tragic life trajectory of so many fatherless young black males, how are they going to prevent what happened the weekend of Aug. 3?

Ironically, the solutions which might help to make the streets of Chicago and other cities at least a bit safer under dismal present circumstances—more aggressive policing, tougher sentences (especially for crimes involving firearms), strictly enforced curfews, and perhaps even martial law in the most violent precincts—would instantly be labeled “racist” by the same folks now marching through the north side and demanding that “something” be done.

Those who believe that political correctness is just good manners should take note of what is happening in Chicago, where it prevents honest discussion of what is causing the bloodshed and cripples efforts to address it.

When it comes to law enforcement in our inner cities, political correctness kills.

In 1929, a more civilized time, the nation was shocked by the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” during which seven mobsters were gunned down by other mobsters in a Chicago garage.

How quaint.