By John Kass

October 16, 2022

I was born near the Union Stockyards on the South Side of Chicago.

Early on I learned it was a great neighborhood, with hard, tough, and direct people with big and true hearts. It wasn’t a neighborhood for dreamers. It wasn’t a neighborhood of huggers. And it wasn’t a neighborhood for saps.

We were all taught to have sharp eyes and the lessons were painful.  The men worked at the stockyards or in the can factories on Western. They drank and played 16-inch softball. The women stayed home, minded their kids and their parents and the church. Or they’d sip in silence. It wasn’t ideal.

We’d sit out on the front porches of our two flats, whole families together, commenting on the passing circus of the world.

In Back of the Yards then, nobody had money but the politicians. The rest of us had been thrown together into the giant cast-Iron melting pot, and it was up to each of us to fight our way out of there.

I said it was an honest neighborhood. It wasn’t a neighborhood of fake kindness and virtue signaling, so it wasn’t Oak Park. Nobody would dream about placing a ‘Hate Has No Home Here’ sign in the postage-stamp front yards. Everyone would mock you for a fool. Even the nuns of Visitation Parish would snicker.

It wasn’t a neighborhood of hugs. It was a neighborhood of fists, and we all knew it. And still I loved it and miss it. My cousins lived in two-flats up and down the block. There were fights in the alleys and outside the taverns, and in Sherman Park too, where men like Mr. “Moon” Brannigan became a softball legend.

You didn’t whine. You didn’t complain. There’s no virtue in taking a beating but if you were expected to take one, you kept your mouth shut about it. They took real beatings from cops, metaphorical beatings from judges and aldermen, and bloody beatings from the street gangs.

These weren’t the dancing, finger snapping gangs of “West Side Story” with George Chakiris. These were gangs from Appalachia, the mountain poor hillbilly gangs that didn’t fight like they were expected to fight.

One neighbor, a PTA mom at Sherman School, complained about a hillbilly gang and called the police. Police knocked on her door so the whole neighborhood knew who were the beefers. The next day the hillbillies came for her 8-year-old son in the backyard. They broke both his arms and left him screaming in the sandbox.

A few days later we were gone from the neighborhood. We weren’t fleeing from blacks. We were fleeing lawlessness from whites from Kentucky.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because Illinois under the ruling Democrats have pushed through the most permissive laws ending cash bail in the country. And along the way in my life I began to piece together a political philosophy of sorts about how much people would take. Until very recently it held true.

My theory went like this:

That people would put up with a lot.  They’d take almost anything and still knuckle their foreheads and doff their caps to the politicos, to the cops, to authority, to the priests and the church. But there was one thing they wouldn’t take. They wouldn’t take pain given to their kids.

Don’t threaten their children. Don’t threaten their wives. Don’t put them in danger. They wouldn’t stand for it. They’d stand up and fight. At least, that’s what I thought. That was my theory.

But if Gov. J.B. Pritzker is re-elected, after pushing out the SAFE-T Act, a “law” that will end cash bail in Illinois and cause the release of violent criminals from the jails, well my theory is in the garbage. A people who’d allow such a thing, and support those who’d bring it to them are people who embrace their own suicide.

Most Americans are workers. They’re not afraid of hard work.  And they believe in being fair. It was unfair to deny fellow Americans a seat at a lunch counter based on the color of their skin. The unfairness of such racism compelled Americans to support civil rights. And now, even those who haven’t studied the Constitution or criminal law, there is basic fairness in the idea that all Americans when charged with crime, have the right to bail.

I don’t know who doesn’t support this.  I support it. I  don’t want to live in a country where people are charged and hauled off without a chance for bail.

But what Pritzker and the Democrats have done with their SAFE-T ACT is a perversion of fairness. They use guilt and the fear of being called a racist to push it down the people’s throats.

In Virginia, when the people there understood their children and families were threatened state education bureaucrats, the voters stood up and fought back. They didn’t want Critical Race Theory pushed in their schools. They stood up, like that tired soldier in the painting “The Freedom of Speech” that I wrote about last year. Like that mom in Virginia who grew up in China and survived the Cultural Revolution there.

But Illinois is a different place. There is a cost to taking beating after beating without complaint. When it comes time to stand and fight, the fight has been whipped right out of them.

The Democrats are pushing that SAFE-T Act of theirs. It will let violent criminals out of jail and the people of Illinois are supposed to keep their mouths shut about that. If you dare say complain, Pritzker and the Illinois Democrat Party he’s bought, and the corporate legacy media in Illinois will call you a racist.

Who wants to be called a racist? It’s like being called a white supremacist. The next step is a knock on the door from the FBI.

Pritzker has hitched his political future to the SAFE-T Act. The Illinois Black Caucus is for it, Attorney Gen. Kwame Raul was there as the law was passed in the middle of the night. Why didn’t Raoul warn the people? Because he didn’t want to.

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle is for it,  as is Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, and Preckwinkle’s protegee, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx.

The Chicago Tribune, which has endorsed Preckwinkle, has partnered up with the progressive group “Injustice Watch” that has been running interference for Pritzker on the issue. Not only the Trib, but the Sun Times, and much of corporate media that helps him portray those who disagree with him as racist extremists. They run cover for him.

The Safe-T Act is his baby now.

But not everyone is for it.

Wirepoints.org isn’t for it. Wirepoints is opposed, and rightly so, calling it Pritzker’s not-so safe-t act.

And 100 of the 102 county state’s attorneys (county prosecutors) in Illinois are opposed to it.

Many are Democrats, yet they say the Democrat Safe-T Act will release violent criminals and cause a threat to public safety.

Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow, a Democrat and critic of the Safe-T Act was interviewed Friday on the Morning Answer radio show with Dan Proft and Amy Jacobson.

Glasgow and Kankakee County State’s Attorney James Rowe, also a Democrat, have filed a lawsuit against the legislation claiming it violates the Constitution.

“This is not political for me,” Glasgow said. “Jim Rowe and I are Democrats. On September 22 we were the first two prosecutors to file suit to declare this law unconstitutional, which it truly is…Trying to amend this law, because it’s unconstitutional, is like doing a heart transplant on a cadaver.”

Glasgow explained what will happen when no-cash bail becomes the law in January, when it will be too late to reverse course, as the jails are emptied of violent offenders, as the hard left celebrates and makes virtue-signaling tweets.

“The reason I’m able to have peace and quiet in Will County is that I’m able to restrain the volent offenders,” Glasgow said. “When Chicago gang members come to Will County [and commit crime], they usually don’t leave, they’re in the Will County Jail. The word gets to Chicago, they don’t come here anymore.”

But as the Democrat Safe-T Act begins releasing arrestees from jails, Glasgow and other prosecutors will lose that leverage to keep public order.

“I lose that ability and then the violent predators who are terrorizing Chicago, they’re going to branch out,” he said. “It’s always the path of least resistance. We give them maximum resistance in Will County. I’ll lose all that with this new law.”

All living creatures respond to discomfort. They avoid pain. And they avoid places where they expect to encounter pain. For the predatory mind most choices are about potential costs and benefits.

What’s most insulting about this is that the Illinois Democrats know the Safe-T Act is flawed and dangerous. Pritzker and the rest talk vaguely about making “tweaks” in the law. Why not just repeal it and start over?

Because now the Illinois Democrats have locked themselves in with Pritzker and the Black Caucus and Boss Toni Preckwinkle and Kim Foxx and Lori Lightfoot and Kwame Raul on this. And rather than stop and repeal the damn thing and give Republicans an advantage, they’ll push on and put innocent people at risk. Because their politics is more important to them than the safety of the people.

Will the violence be epic, with mothers crying “Why? Why? Why?” into shaky hand-held cameras on TV news?  Will it be like that movie, ‘the Purge’ as Republicans say?

Or will it be quiet suffering in hospitals, and silence in the waiting rooms as the loved ones of the victims to come pray? And much hand-wringing from the political left in their op-eds in friendly newspapers?

And what of my old theory that the people of Illinois would take just about anything and everything except threats to their families, their children? That will have to be re-examined along with the results of the November 8 election. We’ll find out if Pritzker’s Safe-T Act was a push too far from the Democrats.

If Illinois voters elect Pritzker–and by electing him they’re embracing his Safe-T Act–with all they know about it now, with 100 of 102 prosecutors of both parties and most of law enforcement warning against it, then we’ll finally know something.

We’ll know if they’re so afraid of criticism that they’d put their children and wives at risk. The Illinois Democrat leaders pushing this policy have taxpayer funded bodyguards and security services. Some, like Pritzker will move their families out of state, to Florida just as he moved them during the pandemnic, as he shut Illinois down for the rest of us.

But most voters don’t have the option of sending their families to live elsewhere.

As in the past in Illinois, they’re supposed to just shut up and take it. And take it again, and again.

 

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(Copyright 2022 John Kass)