This is a tale of two black people and one major city.
Within just the last week, Walmart closed half its store locations in Chicago, and the city police department instituted new curfew and bag-check policies at public parks and beaches following days of “reckless, disruptive and violent behavior.”
A sane person who prefers living in a clean, safe, and prosperous city would see that news and say things are going in the wrong direction, and the people who are responsible for it need to be held accountable.
That’s how popular TikTok user The Blaq Mamba reacted in a video she posted Sunday. “What really saddens me about this,” she said, referring to the closure of one Walmart location in the South Side, “is that this Walmart was built in a predominantly black neighborhood. This is probably about the only major resource as far as like, shopping and access to groceries and access to pharmacy within a 10-block, maybe even a 10-mile radius.” She added, “And what’s really sad to me is how us black folks, we done stole and robbed ourselves out of a f-cking resource that even the elderly people of this community will not be able to have access to.”
She said she was “ashamed and saddened” because “We blame everybody else for our sh-t but then when we are tapped out of resources in our own community, we don’t ever want to look at ourselves and point the finger back at ourselves, and say, okay, maybe we f-cked up. Maybe we shouldn’t have been going in there stealing TVs and going in there stealing electronics and all this other sh-t … We need to do better.”
A person who is perhaps not sane or who is, at minimum, a societal parasite sucking the life and goodness out of everything would react just the opposite. He would excuse the ne’er-do-wells, thieves, and fiends. Instead, he would direct blame at those who refuse to tolerate anti-social behavior.
That’s how deadbeat incoming Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson reacted in 2020, the year of Saint George Floyd rioting. (I assume you don’t need me to tell you he’s a Democrat.) Johnson saw no urgency to the situation. “I’m saying that people are acting out of desperation,” he said in a remote TV interview, dialing in from what looked fittingly like a jail cell. “We don’t want a society that is acting out of desperation. But you have to pay attention to the cries that people have.” Asked if he condones the rampant looting that has forced countless businesses to close, he said, “What I’m saying is that you can’t condone the looting that corporations continue to do every single day when they take tax dollars from black, brown, white folks all over the city of Chicago so that they can turn a profit.”
Following this past weekend of street thugging and mayhem around the once-cherished Millennium Park, during which two teens and a six-year-old boy were shot, Johnson said in a statement that it’s “not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.”
I don’t know about you, but the first thing that comes to mind when I see a teen snatching a handle of Hennessy before climbing a street light is definitely “a society that is acting out of desperation.”
What is there really left to say at this point? There appear to be more Brandon Johnsons than there Blaq Mambas. It’s too bad. Chicago could be a nice place. It used to be. Now it’s another ghetto for people like Johnson to further plunge into squalor.
