Jammie Wearing Fool Gets Close, But Still Misses

Some authorities in Chicago are calling for the National Guard to step in and quell the violence in the city. This is an opportunity to mock the Organizer-in-Chief and make hay against the Democrats that run the government there, but after all the fun has been had, it doesn't really address the problem. JWF (linked above) gets close to the answer.

Oh yeah, root causes, whatever those are. But if we point out some of those root causes, like an alarming out-of-wedlock rate, a culture of entitlement, the gangsta rap lifestyle, well, you're reflexively called raaaaacist.

After which he veers off into politics.

What the folks in Chicago really need is regime change in City Hall, for starters.

Political change is not the answer. Chicago's violence is the rich harvest of cultural degradation. It's Two and a Half Men having fun with sexual promiscuity, it's political speeches discussing the "less fortunate" as if poverty is the result of a lottery draw, it's hip hop music using the word "nigger" while screaming about racism, it's payday lenders and credit card companies finding easy prey in our materialistic culture, but most of all, it's moral relativism.

There really are root causes and each of them, in turn, are treated as things we won't pass judgement on. For decades we've denied that there is anything larger than gratifying our own bodily pleasures and now we reap the whirlwind. And what pleasures have we truly gained?

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Nat King Cole knew true racism, not the ersatz, fantasy racism of the Black Congressional Caucus acting like carnival shooting gallery ducks walking back and forth through protestors hoping to catch someone shouting a forbidden word. The song above, (I Love You) for Sentimental Reasons, is not a tender ballad on a disc of otherwise obscenity-laced chanting, it's not the opening theme to an "edgy" HBO sitcom featuring necrophilia, bestiality and underage sex and it's not music to get baked by. It's part of a larger, consistently prudish body of work by an American culture that knew racism, apartheid, intolerance and poverty deeper than we have today. That American culture also saw much smaller prison populations, illegitimate births, divorce rates, sexual assaults and other social pathologies.

We've tried the libertine, moral relativist way. It has failed spectacularly. Suggesting that the failure can be repaired by electing Republicans trivializes our failures and the damage and hurt we've done to the poor people in Chicago. The source of the failures that have led to requests for a military presence in the streets of our cities to stop the violence looks back at us in the mirror every day. Until we address that, we're going to keep carting bodies off the streets in ambulances no matter how many troops are out there.