(Starting out with a quick thank you, Deb, for the coffee!! You’d almost think I already had consumed it when I wrote this, it reads a little caffeine-fueled. Thank you for the fuel).
It’s sunny and pretty cool, about 60 F (15.5 C), like someone flipped a switch and now it’s autumn. For the first time in my life I am hoping winter comes quickly, because if the military is going to line the streets of Chicago, I want it to be in a stinging, biting wind.
Especially if they’re from Texas.
No it’s not their personal fault if they’re deployed, I suppose that’s true but it is their fault if they follow illegal orders. And there is absolutely no legal authority or justification for a state to HOSTILELY send their National Guard into another state.
Especially when the state has made it as clear as it is possible to do that the military is not needed or wanted. As I said, it’s hostile.
It’s amazing how the news stories and reports dance around “questionable legality.” There is no legality. There is none.
Like how executive orders don’t become laws just because one guy who may or may not be dead and or a body double says so.
Chicago has a stunning lakefront, with a lakefront trail that extends for 18.5 miles of beautiful park. Chicago has a symphony orchestra that is recognized among the best in the world.
Chicago has incredible museums with amazing sights you can see only here. American Gothic, Nighthawks, The Bedroom, along with other works by Van Gogh, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Chagall, and on an on and on, iconic pieces you’ve seen over and over again, they all call the Art Institute of Chicago home.
Sue the T. Rex is only one among a evolutionary plethora of specimens at the Field Museum, and you can visit along it with the Adler Planetarium and Shedd Aquarium at the Museum Campus, right on the lake front.
Ooh. How scary.
Or head further down the Drive (that’s DuSable Lake Shore Drive, recently renamed after the founder of Chicago, Jean Baptiste Point DuSable) to the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry and check out their Spider-Man exhibit.
Our architecture, but for one eyesore of a useless building, is world renown. We are a city of neighborhoods all with different flavors, with much of the spicing depending on where people are from. We don’t resent it.
We embrace it.
And it’s one of the reasons we have such amazing food, which landed us as #2 on the Food & Wine Top 10 US cities. Right behind New York, which isn’t new for us.
We’re not called the second city for nothing.
Speaking of, Second City has given the world generation after generation of comedy geniuses. And we don’t only have comedy, we have theater, from small stages to major ones, like the famed Steppenwolf.
We are not awash in crime. Crime rates are actually down, a fact that bears repeating over and over and over.
We are people living our lives, day to day, in a city we love. We walk down the streets, we ride the L, some people bike and wow are they brave for it, I wouldn’t do that, we’re not a biking city, not yet, but they’re working on the infrastructure.
We enjoy our greenspace and we help our neighbors. We chat in elevators and in lines, and we have actual values, not calculations that change with what’s popular or advantageous.
We have festival after festival, street fair after street fair, and famer’s markets that pop up from place to place and day to day.
We don’t fear. We live.
I want you to know, now. I want you know what it is like, now. I want you to know that all this talk of crime and “hellholes” is nonsense, is based in a seething bigotry over who our citizens are, who our residents are.
And how we welcome them.
Do not accept the false pictures. Come visit for yourself, come walk the Mag Mile and see the Water Tower, one of the few remaining structures from before the fire. Pick a neighborhood and dive in, there are so many from which to choose. Spend an afternoon by the lake and try to convince yourself it’s just a lake as you watch the boats go by.
We’re fine here in Chicago. We are fine. And if the federal government wants to “help,” pass some gun control.
You can’t push for unlimited guns and then cry at the consequences. You can’t overturn our gun laws and cry at the consequences.
Anyway, that’s it for me today, as I look out at my little slice of the city while seeing zero crime. Have a wonderful Thursday.
A Bit to Read 
Leave a comment