Big City Woes

Over the Memorial Day weekend there were 53 shootings--eleven of them fatal--in the City of Chicago. It was the bloodiest Memorial Day weekend since 2015. Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) blamed this carnage on "the community disinvestment, poverty, and trauma that our city has struggled with far too long."

Interim Police Department Superintendent Fred Waller said "it pains me knowing that too many of our residents have seen or experienced this proliferation of gun violence. No one should fear for their own safety in their own neighborhood.”

The first action of the Chicago City Council following these murders was to approve spending $51 million to support the more than 10,000 illegal aliens that have arrived in the city since August of 2022. Johnson applauded the spending, calling it "necessary to offset the population decreases caused by intractable crime and migration to other safer areas of the country."

The most vociferous opposition to this spending at the City Council meeting was a complaint that "this money should have been used to fund a Chicago Reparations Ordinance to compensate Blacks for the harms done to us by slavery and Jim Crow."

Meanwhile, San Francisco is facing similar problems due to similar governing policies by its Democrats. The once vibrant downtown is plagued by lawlessness, human feces pollution, and boarded up stores. San Francisco Travel, a local tourism boosting organization, released an ad asserting that "now is a better time than ever to visit the city by the bay. Crowds are the smallest they've been since the 1906 earthquake. There are more under-used porta-potties per square mile than ever before. And daily free family-friendly drag queen street performances. So come and like the great Tony Bennett song urges, leave your heart in San Francisco."

SEMI-NEWS/SEMI-SATIRE by John Semmens