A Counterinsurgency in Chicago

Mr. Bay,

Why is it among all of the stark ideological disagreements between conservatives and liberals, many conservatives are in near lockstep with liberals on this issue? For a movement that considers itself the ‘party of life,’ I find that troubling. Here’s why.

None of the reasons you listed in, “The War in Chicago?” (many stipulated by Mayor Daley himself) even rank a distant second to the main reason everyone should support deployment of the National Guard into the troubled areas of Chicago – saving lives. At my last count in November of 2009, 36 schoolchildren had been killed by random violence here in Chicago. That number is higher today. Families and Police are unable to provide protection; in fact, CPD is 2100 officers short of full strength. A contract renegotiation this year means even more officers will retire and not enough are in the academy pipeline.

You said it “exceeds political hyperbole and enters the realm of blockheaded ignorance,” to compare Chicago to an Afghan war zone. I agree the two are mutually exclusive, but there are many factors in those foreign theaters that also exist in some form in these troubled local ones: low resources, low opportunity, low finances, high-income drug sales, prolific illegal weapons, warlordism (gangs), intense violence, frightened families caught in the middle, tribalism (you’re from that neighborhood, I’m from this one), generations of heartache, and meager hope. It is not normal for any community to lose this many children to this much violence – this is America. How bad does it have to get before everyone decides it is an unequivocal ‘war zone?’

We are disrespecting the people living in these communities because we are not advocating for them the very same security the rest of us can afford for ourselves, but which they cannot provide for – they have simply not been given the necessary protection that governments are obligated to provide to their governed. At this point, only the intervention of overwhelming sustained security appropriate to this level of violence can do that. And only then, when these traumatized people feel safe enough, when they trust the authorities more than they fear the thugs, will they give up the bad guys and reclaim their communities - just like in the Iraq and Afghan theaters.

The people of Iraq and Afghanistan have security today because soldiers and Marines with loaded weapons and the training to use them stand between the villagers and the thugs who mean them harm. Period. We would not expect cooperation from them in any way, to locate terrorists, inform on their plots, and turn against them, were it not for that continued security. In fact, the decided lack of security is the chief reason these people supported the terrorists in the first place. Just like here in Chicago, these folks have families to protect and no way to protect them, of course they’re going to side with the gangs and thugs with a, “code of silence.”

If schoolchildren and young people in your own neighborhood were being shot down and murdered at the horrific rate they are here in Chicago with authorities powerless to stop it, and leaders were talking of ‘taxpayers footing the bill’ and the procedural complications of Guard deployment instead of emphasizing the protection of the lives of yours/mine/their children … we could begin to understand why this is so insultingly disrespectful. These folks cannot stop their children from being killed and Mayor Daley spends $42 million on a failed Olympic bid. It should make us all sick.

The simple truth is this: we may make more money, be more affluent, and live in nicer violence-free communities, but in one way, a way that eclipses all others in controlling importance, these people living embattled lives in these besieged communities are our equal – their lives and the lives of their loved ones are as important to them as ours are to us. This is the very sentiment of the Declaration of Independence when it speaks of the unalienable right of life – our singular shared universal human value, superseding all other relative values, and the basis for every life-affirming moral value: freedom, democracy, liberty, and goodness.

In 1954, President Eisenhower deployed the 101st Airborne and the National Guard of Arkansas to protect 9 black schoolchildren from the mobs controlling the streets of Little Rock after school integration. They stayed for months until it was safe. The National Guard needs to be deployed now to rescue these people – protecting them and granting them the very same security we enjoy is the first step for them to reclaim their communities.

When we can put our own safety at risk to protect and stand between them and the evil that threatens their lives and their children’s lives, it will be the strongest message and acknowledgement yet to that beleaguered community of our respect for them as equals as well as noble affirmation of the Declaration’s intention of inalienable human equality. If we do not understand this, we don’t deserve to call ourselves Americans.

This is the right and moral side of this issue. Please reconsider this.

Warm regards,

James Morganelli
Chicago