In progressive Chicago… Moody’s has cut its credit rating to two grades above “junk.”…The steady financial decline of the nation’s third-largest city prompted us recently to say that Chicago was well on its way to becoming the next Detroit….[P]rospects aren’t good, as people – particularly high-income individuals and businesses – flee the city’s high taxes and stiff regulations….People are leaving in droves, voting the only way they can in a one-party town – with their feet.From 2000 to 2009, Chicago’s population shrank by 200,000 – the only one of the nation’s 15 largest cities to lose people. The city now has 145,000 fewer school-age children than it had more than a decade ago, according to district data, forcing the closure of about 100 schools since 2001.
Those school closures are playing a part in the embarrassing run-off election Mayor Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s former chief-of-staff, is facing, and which he may lose:
Emanuel recently emerged from the Windy City’s mayoral primary with just 45% of the vote against four opponents, forcing Chicago’s first-ever mayoral runoff. A poll taken.. Feb. 28 showed Emanuel leading second-place primary finisher Jesus “Chuy” Garcia… by a slim 42.9% to 38.5% margin.
About those school closures, from the New York Times, yesterday:
The sky-blue paint has begun to peel on the three-story building that was onceAnthony Overton Elementary [pictured below]. Window air-conditioners are speckled with rust. Doors where children used to rush in and out are sealed with plywood.
The empty shell of this school on Chicago’s largely black South Side stands as a reminder of one of Rahm Emanuel’s defining acts as mayor: overseeing the closing of nearly 50 public schools deemed underperforming, underutilized or both. It was the largest closing of schools in memory, with many of them in black or Latinoneighborhoods….“It hurts,” said Earvin Wade, 55, who lives across the street. “You used to have a lot of kids there, families around. It was at the heart of our neighborhood. Now it’s nothing but an eyesore.”…[I]n the end, it may be the education agenda that [Emanuel] proudly, defiantly and swiftly carried out that threatens his political future.
Population shrinkage and closing schools may in part be blamed on people “flee[ing] the city,” but an equally obvious reason for the decline is abortion.
Between 1995 and 2013, the dates for which Illinois county abortion breakdowns are available, a staggering 486,743 children were aborted in Cook County, accounting for 55.8% of the 872,631 abortions committed in Illinois during those 19 years.
Those are just the past two decades, with the two decades of legalized abortion before that likely the same.
The children aborted in 1973 would have been having their own children during the 1990s, so the number of lost people is compounded beyond what we see.
It is tragic that black and Hispanic neighborhoods in Chicago are blighted by empty schools. But the people themselves killed off the students. Blacks and Hispanics have a much higher rate of abortion than whites. According to Guttmacher, five times as many blacks as whites get abortions, and two times as many Hispanics as whites.
And abortion is just one social ill contributing to Chicago’s demise.
“In Chicago, 51% of children live in single-parent homes,” notes the Chicago Tribune.
Had Democrats in charge of the city since 1931 embraced conservative social values and encouraged premarital abstinence and stronger two-parent married families, the children allowed to live would not be “underperforming” in school to the extent that they are, along with being the victims of other societal plagues.
Such as murder, which unstable homes contribute to. Quoting Pew Research:
In terms of raw number of murders, Chicago has long been at or near the top of U.S. cities, according to FBI crime statistics. In 2012, it had 500 murders, the most of any city in the country; Chicago has been among the top three cities with the most murders since 1985.
Will the people wake up? But politicians aren’t the answer. They’re part of the problem.
Churches with their theological act together are really Chicago’s only hope.
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By Jill Stanek, JillStanek.com
