Chicago: The Thrill of Victory and The Agony of Defeat
At .637, the Chicago Cubs are still leading this year's standings of Major League Baseball with an edifying display of discipline and fundamental execution.
While on the other end of town, other types of execution:
Eight-year-old Jamia Barnes was playing Sunday evening on a front lawn near a vigil for a teenage boy killed hours earlier when she saw a man in a car arguing with a woman outside.... She saw a flash and smoke... "That's when I felt my arm stinging," she said Monday. "And I was hollering for my mommy. And that's it. And I went to the hospital."
Jamia's family has been marked by violence almost her entire life growing up in the Austin neighborhood on Chicago's West Side. Seven years ago, her aunt, then 28, was shot dead in an apparent drive-by shooting in the 1600 block of North Mason Avenue. Then last summer, her 11- and 19-year-old brothers were shot not far away while working on a dirt bike on a sunny afternoon in the 1800 block of North Monitor Avenue. When Jamia screamed for her mother after being shot, she was scooped up and driven to West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park by Ashake Banks, a family friend whose own 7-year-old daughter was shot to death a few blocks away four summers ago.
Some might say that Banks' daughter got to live 7 years longer than the victim's of Kermit Gosnell and his ilk. I guess, if you are a "progressive", then that counts as progress?
There are obviously some people who cannot, or will not, exercise the discipline and responsibility that is necessary to live in a free society; that's why we have police and jails. The problem has been exacerbated by corrupt politicians, and then dumped on the police. The politicians then, in an attempt to nullify their own malfeasance, blame guns or the police for being overzealous or ineffective.
/fl