It is sure to bridge divides and not, say, completely implode the tax base.
The City of Chicago is groaning this summer, and not just because of the unfortunate arrival of a brood of 17-year cicadas that look like they were spawned from sewage vats. Crime is high, taxes are high, the temperature is high. Heck — half the people you run into on the street are high. Our infrastructure is collapsing, our pension debt crushingly unmanageable, our electorate surly and disengaged. The Democratic National Convention is coming to town, for God’s sake, and in its train a circus full of pyromaniac keffiyeh-clad protest goons angling to engulf the city in disaster to punish the Democrats for failing to nuke Tel Aviv.
Thankfully, we have Brandon Johnson to make it all better. Johnson’s tenure to date as Chicago’s mayor has been defined by his competence and commitment to soberly and directly addressing the city’s many problems — as in, he is ruinously incompetent and demonstrates all the commitment and seriousness of purpose of a fentanyl addict stumbling repetitively in circles around the Bean in Millennium Park. The city’s voters recently rejected his proposed property-sales-tax increase — a stunner in blue Chicago — and the Chicago city council then voted to block his attempt to rid the city of ShotSpotter, an anti-crime technology he and his activist cadre oppose on purely ideological grounds.
Johnson’s on the ropes, and we haven’t even gotten to the true dog days of summer yet. But before his attention gets diverted from matters by all that unfortunate rioting due in late August, he has acted boldly to heal Chicago’s racial divides: He has signed an executive order setting up a “Reparations Task Force” with the ultimate goal of developing a “reparations plan” for the city.
According to the mayor’s office, the task force will conduct a study and analysis of policies that have affected Black Chicagoans from slavery to the present day. Based on this analysis, the task force will recommend remedies to racial inequities caused by such policies.
Now, you might have thought that Chicago, as the largest city in the Land of Lincoln, would be an unlikely candidate for slave reparations; then again, just ask Chicago suburb Evanston, which devoted $10 million to reparations three years ago in the wake the George Floyd riots and by so doing instantly ended all black inequity and poverty in their town in one fell swoop. But Brandon Johnson knows better than you: In his executive order, he states that Chicago is basically covered in the blood of slaves and dead Indians:
WHEREAS, Chicago was founded by Jean Baptiste Point du Sable in 1780 on traditional homelands of the Anishinaabe, or the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawomi Nations; and
WHEREAS, Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837 and perpetuated, condoned, profited, and benefitted from the system of chattel slavery in both direct and indirect ways; and
WHEREAS, the legal institution of slavery was followed by the Jim Crow era (1877-1963) that consisted of a series of laws and cultural practices that legalized and perpetuated racial segregation and discrimination, and
WHEREAS, Black Chicagoans were impacted by a series of Jim Crow laws and other racially discriminatory laws, including . . .
I’ll spare you the rest, which is a tiresome laundry list of progressive complaints. All you really need to know is that black people have gotten a raw deal in Chicago, and the rest of the city is going to pay out the nose if Brandon Johnson gets his way. So now we get an official citywide “Chicago Black Reparations Agenda,” to be staffed exclusively by members of the Chicago Aldermanic Black Caucus. It is sure to bridge divides in a tense city and not, say, completely implode the tax base. Wish us luck.
(By the way, Native Americans aren’t getting anything under this proposed plan, but it sure felt good to vicariously apologize to them, didn’t it?)