DON'T BLACK LIVES IN CHICAGO MATTER?

These are tumultuous times. Things are changing so fast it’s hard to keep up, much less put events into perspective. It’s reminiscent of a similar struggle to understand things during the sixties when a prosperous, stable, post-WWII America started unraveling with the Kennedy assassination in 1963. I was in 7th grade and lacked the experience and historical knowledge to interpret what was happening. By the time I graduated high school in 1969, societal decline had advanced.

My first year of college included basic courses in western civilization which offered some historical grounding, but my professors weren’t gifted enough to compare and contrast ubiquitous race riots, anti-Vietnam War protests, and ongoing civil-rights struggles with similar events in western history. My English Composition professor tried by offering writing prompts that challenged us to reflect on what was happening around us.

Things were changing fast and my professors hadn’t experienced such tumult before. They were flying by the seat of their pants. After two years I dropped out, worked various jobs, and found myself rubbing elbows with disciples of Saul Alinsky — community organizers who were trying to channel societal unrest toward a communist revolution. One put a copy of Alinsky’s “Rules For Radicals” into my hands — the first copy I ever saw.

Nearly all smoked marijuana and I did too. It was a leftist ritual of the era. At one point I found a half-dozen leftist radicals in the living room of a tenement we owned in Lowell, Massachusetts. Some belonged to the Socialist Labor Party, some to the Socialist Workers Party, and one was communist. All argued  vociferously about how to foment revolution. I wasn’t too stoned to notice how disorganized and contentious the left was.

Never did I want to make revolution or overthrow the government, but radical leftists around me spoke freely about trying to. I thought they were crazy and moved away from them, but that experience give me perspective on what’s going on in my country today. Again the left is trying to steer public outrage toward a communist revolution, and unlikely as revolution was a half-century ago, the widespread violence of recent months has me concerned.

Leftists still fight amongst themselves, but today they make up an increasingly large part of the Democrat Party which for decades has controlled the cities in which we’re seeing widespread rioting, looting and toppling of statues. Ironically, most of the statues depict historical figures who were Democrat slave owners. As today’s Democrat mayors and governors do almost nothing to stop the violence, the rest of us wonder if that’s because they’re afraid a strong response will trigger more or because they approve of it all.

Some of last weekend's victims in Chicago

After a violent Fathers’ Day weekend in Chicago when 102 mostly black people were shot, very likely by shooters who were also black, those shouting “Black Lives Matter!” sound increasingly hypocritical. White cops are not the problem. So-called “systemic racism” is not the problem. “White Privilege” is not the problem. Gangs of fatherless, young, black men are the problem.

Alleged shooters in Chicago last weekend

These shootings go on every weekend and have for years — in Chicago, and in many other Democrat-controlled cities. Where’s the leftist hand-wringing about that? We don’t hear it. The Marxist “Black Lives Matter” movement looks like a massive red herring to divert attention from what the real problem is: fatherless black boys from dysfunctional families — all the result of bankrupt Democrat social policies of the last fifty years.

It’s getting increasingly tiresome to hear over and over about George Floyd’s death. Yes, the video of his asphyxiation under the knee of a police officer was horrifying, but we keep pretending that the relentless murder of young black men by young black men isn’t far more horrifying. Calling attention to that, however, doesn’t serve the Democrat narrative that it’s a “systemic racism” extinguishing black lives.

Kerry in Lowell, 1972

In 1972 I arranged a meeting in my living room between radical leftist revolutionaries and liberal-Democrat congressional candidate John Kerry. Back then it was unusual for rising Democrats like Kerry to fraternize with leftist revolutionaries, but it isn’t anymore. Today’s Democrat Party willingly plays with fire as senior officials like Deputy DNC Chairman Keith Ellison and others openly support violent, leftist Antifa thugs and Marxist Black Lives Matter organizers.

While John Kerry was considered a far-left Democrat during his failed 1972 congressional campaign, he looks downright moderate compared to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and the rest of today’s rising Democrat stars.

The Power of Images

Pictures and words: Both are powerful. Governor Ralph Northam’s remarks about an abortion bill last week put him on the hot seat, but pictures from an old yearbook released a couple of days later left him hanging by a thread. He began the week describing how a newborn baby would be kept comfortable while parents and doctors discussed killing it. Two days later he tried to explain two of his old pictures: one in blackface; another of a figure wearing a KKK hood. If he has to resign, it’ll be the pictures that force it and not his talk of killing babies after they’re born.

The Congressional Black Caucus knew a 2005 picture they had of then-Senator Barack Obama smiling with Black Muslim Minister Louis Farrakhan would make his election to the White House difficult, so they buried it for twelve years. It only came to light in 2018 when his second term was over. "I do believe that it would have had a very, very negative effect in that given moment as far as the candidacy of candidate Obama at that time," says Dr. Shayla Nunnally, president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.

As I’ve reported before in this space, my students often debated abortion in my classes. During one of the first debates, pictures of aborted babies were introduced by the pro-life side and it was all over. The pro-choice side conceded immediately. After that, I made a rule against using them. The purpose of debating was expressing ideas, making coherent points and counterpoints, and stimulating thought. The pictures were so powerful they prevented that exchange and rendered mere words superfluous.

Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) knows the power of images. Shortly after announcing her candidacy for president two weeks ago she took on the gun lobby. Referring to a failed gun control bill following the Sandy Hook massacre, she said: "This is going to sound very harsh, [but] I think somebody should have required all those members of Congress to go in a room, in a locked room with no press and nobody else, and look at the autopsy photographs of those babies.”

However, when at least one video image of a baby murdered at an abortion clinic was revealed during Harris’s tenure as Attorney General of California, she worked to suppress it, claiming it was deceptively edited. Together with videos of abortionists discussing how they try not to crush heads and other body parts so they could sell them later, those images threatened government funding of Planned Parenthood and exposed it to prosecution for trafficking in aborted babies’ body parts. Dozens of undercover videos had been recorded at public events attended by David Dalieden and abortionists, then released online.

Planned Parenthood was a major contributor to Harris’s US Senate campaign. In April 2016, her office sent eleven agents to raid Dalieden’s home and seize all his equipment and remaining videos after which Dalieden released a statement saying:

Today, the California Attorney General’s office of Kamala Harris, who was elected with tens of thousands of dollars from taxpayer-funded Planned Parenthood, seized all video footage showing Planned Parenthood’s criminal trade in aborted baby parts, in addition to my personal information. Ironically, while seizing my First Amendment work product, they ignored documents showing the illicit scheme between StemExpress and Planned Parenthood. This is no surprise–Planned Parenthood’s bought-and-paid-for AG has steadfastly refused to enforce the law against the baby body parts traffickers in our state, or even investigate them–while at the same time doing their bidding to harass and intimidate citizen journalists. We will pursue all remedies to vindicate our First Amendment rights.

President Trump felt the power of images while campaigning for president in 2016 after NBC released a video of him talking to someone about grabbing women by their genitals. While he squeaked by in the November election, the video definitely cost him support among women. The day after his inauguration, hundreds of thousands marched wearing “pussy hats” in Washington, DC. Tens of thousands more marched in cities and towns across the country.

A dorky-looking picture of Governor Michael Dukakis wearing a helmet in a tank may have contributed to his loss against George H. W. Bush in 1988. An image of John Kerry crawling around in a spacesuit at NASA hurt him in his campaign against George W. Bush in 2004. Richard Nixon reinforced voter impressions of being too stiff when a picture emerged of him walking on a beach in San Clemente wearing his wing tips.

How many words is a picture worth? Sometimes it seems like way more than a thousand.