Posted on 10/31/2022 6:13:15 AM PDT by MtnClimber
A conservative’s argument to stay and fight.
Chicago was an amazing, exciting city when my family relocated to the area in the mid-1980s. “Da Bears” were Super Bowl champions. The Bulls had drafted a player out of North Carolina named Michael Jordan, who showed some real promise. The economy was relatively strong. Ferris Bueller showed the nation how much fun the city could be.
But there was a cancer growing. Underfunded pensions, high taxes, crime, poorly performing schools—and yes, the weather—caused many people to consider leaving both Chicago and the state of Illinois. And now they have . . . in droves.
“Illinois’ population declined by 113,776 from July 1, 2020, through July 1, 2021. No other Midwestern or neighboring state saw a population decline of more than 17,000,” reports the Illinois Policy Center. Last year marked the eighth consecutive year that Illinois saw a decline in its population.
With the country’s highest tax rates, second-highest property taxes, second-highest gas tax, and nation-leading pension debt, Illinoisians are voting with their feet.
Sadly, it is the state’s highest-income earners and most-educated residents who are leaving. This drains the tax base and puts a heavier burden on less-educated, poorer residents who simply may not be able to afford to move.
In addition, major corporations are now heading for greener pastures. Boeing, Caterpillar, Citadel, and Tyson Foods have announced plans to leave the state, which means Illinois will lose four of the 35 Fortune 500 companies once based there. It’s little wonder why. As real estate analyst Don Catalano notes, “Illinois’s regulatory environment, taxes, high crime, and dwindling talent base have earned the state a spot on the list of worst states for business for 11 consecutive years.”
In April, Citadel founder and CEO Ken Griffin explained his dismay in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “If people aren’t safe here [in Chicago], they are not going to live here . . . I’ve had multiple colleagues mugged at gunpoint. I’ve had a colleague stabbed on the way to work. Countless issues of burglary. I mean, that’s a really difficult backdrop with which to draw talent to your city . . . ”
I decided in January to leave Chicago. My reasons mirrored those of most people leaving the city: crime, taxes, traffic, and the lack of support for police from politicians.
Things changed for me on July 4, when a gunman climbed onto a roof in the affluent Chicago suburb of Highland Park and opened fire, killing seven people and wounding dozens of others. There was wall-to-wall coverage of the shooting for days by both local and national media.
This was truly a sad event that devastated an entire community. But this is not what made me change my mind. What did was the fact that on the same weekend, there were 10 other people killed and 62 people wounded by gunfire in Chicago . . . and no one seemed to care.
I decided to do some research, and the findings were staggering. Through the end of August, 2,352 people had been shot in Chicago, 448 fatally. In 2021, there were 797 homicides in Chicago and 3,561 shootings, according to the Chicago Police Department. Chicago had a homicide rate of 28.6 for every 100,000 people, significantly above the national homicide rate of 6.5 murders per 100,000. And again, no one seems to care.
And it isn’t just crime.
Only 26 percent of Chicago Public Schools 11th-graders can read and do math at grade level, yet the school district “proudly announced that 84 percent of students graduated in 2021—a new record high.”
Poverty is also a problem. “The most recent poverty data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that 23.2 of Chicago children—and 20.6 of (all) Chicago minorities—live in poverty . . . Overall, 16.4% of the Chicago population lives in poverty, compared to 12.3% of the U.S. as a whole.”
The national nonprofit Feeding America estimated “785,890 people in Cook County, Illinois (where Chicago is located) were food insecure in 2020 . . . a 51 percent increase since 2018.” That means that Cook County has the third-largest population of food-insecure people in the United States.
So, I’ve decided to stay and try to make a difference, and I encourage my fellow conservatives to do the same. No city can survive if its richest, most highly educated population flees. A city cannot survive if the answer to its problems is to ignore them and to let those who cannot leave fend for themselves.
I encourage my fellow conservatives to get involved: run for a school board seat, volunteer for political candidates who want to fix our city, volunteer with organizations that work to address the city’s problems, become a tutor for an “at risk” child. Do something.
We can’t all run to Florida. Besides, if enough of us stay and fight for change, Chicago just may elect its first Republican mayor since 1927.
Don’t come to Florida and vote for the types of politicians that caused you to move to get away from the mess they made.
If anyone is on this thread, they are not likely to do that.
“HE TRIED TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE” can be the inscription on his tombstone in five years or so.
“Chicago was an amazing, exciting city when my family relocated to the area in the mid-1980s”
Sorry, no it wasn’t.
The Cancerous Dem Crapola has been there for more than a century. The bad work rules, tax policies, raw criminality and political corruption ( I repeat myself) have flourished there since the beginning.
That you just realize it now is really quite sad for you, and a horror for the country.
Wisconsin is a beautiful state, with a few pockets of Socialists that think they run the place. They don’t.
Many of us HAVE been working hard since The Steal of 2020, to get a new Governor, and we’ve elected 33+ conservatives into positions of importance such as Mayors, Sheriffs, Police Chiefs and especially School Board Members. We ARE working on it! :)
We have also added 500+ Pole WORKERS and 1,000+ Pole Watchers.
We have gotten ballot drop boxes made illegal in Wisconsin. You vote in person, or you personally HAND YOUR BALLOT to your City/Town Clerk. That’s GOT to stop some of the cheating. There is still mail-in ballots for shut-ins, but it’s now, ‘Safe, Legal and Rare’ to quote Clinton. ;)
I’m hopeful for Wisconsin. Even with a doofus Art Teacher in the Governor’s Chair for now, we’ve got a strong Republican House and Assembly (Senate) in place, thanks to Governor Scott Walker. It has been able to block a lot of stupidity coming from Tony ‘One and Done’ Evers, (D, WI).
Bless you!
You are working to make a difference.
Florida may sound ‘ideal’ but we’re working down here, as well, to ensure it stays that way!
Herein lies the problem.
Half of the writer's solutions involve government. To be sure, govt screws things up bigly.
But I've found that private action and something as "meaningless" as working with Boy Scouts yields better and longer-lasting results.
Sure...join the School Board. And watch your peers defend a conga line of stupid things. Be a voice crying in the wilderness...and get doxxed.
Before MacArthur could return, he got out of Corrigedor.
Obviously its because this guy is a racist. All of the myriad other reasons enunciated are just a smokescreen. /s
WE can’t all go to A Free State—Then why not FIGHT for your state? Turn Progressive states red—Don’t vote for Democrats—even if they have slick sayings and fancy TV slots. Match in the streets, Take action. We can’t all become Batman but we can show the nut cases in charge we are not happy. Shut down the cities!
Hopelessly optimistic. If it were just lousy liberal Democrats, I myself would have stayed in Maryland. But they are Communists. And, as Matt Bracken, Fernando Aguirre, and probably others, have said, it’s not necessarily a good idea to stay and fight: you will likely lose*, and afterward, nobody in the area will give a damn.
It’s better to fight in your new area, where some other people actually DO give a damn.
*And yes, that does include paying with your life.
At least you have a GOP legisl00ture to work with. In Maryland, the legisl00ture is supermajority Communist, so even a moderate like Larry Hogan (RINO) doesn’t do very well.
Illinois has a Democrat legislature as well.
As for Wisconsin, another good thing to do is to build a wall on your state’s southern border.
He hasn't been to the right places in Florida. In a week, he'd forget about the Cubs and all that other stuff he was blathering about.
We cannot force people to pursue “the American dream,” let alone cause them to appreciate it. It is a mistake as well to assume everyone “yearns to be free.” While “rugged individualism” may be a hallmark of American life, it is not inherent. If we assume the people overrunning our border are coming here just to suck the teat of government largesse, then we are admitting as much by default. Big cities will suffer when upright citizens vacate, because ill-natured folks are all that is left to fill the vacuum. Whatever happened to that beautiful Baltimore chick who was running for office?
“The Cancerous Dem Crapola has been there for more than a century. The bad work rules, tax policies, raw criminality and political corruption ( I repeat myself) have flourished there since the beginning.”
~~~
It’s amazing the dissonance people will employ, and even embrace, when they think they are succeeding somehow. For many decades there has been a “brain drain” in the midwest and rust-belt to places with higher paying jobs, such as the east coast, california, and perhaps because of the weather also Florida, but Chicago was also one of those destinatins. To go with that higher paying job, one also had to endure and accept a higher cost of living, and a more ‘cosmopolitian’ social/political set of beliefs, or at least live with them.
But once your city refuses to protect you from distopian levels of crime, even if at-the-least after the fact with lack of criminal prosecution, then higher paying jobs are obviously no longer worth it.
I’m fine right where I am, which is not in Chicago.
“I’ve had multiple colleagues mugged at gunpoint. I’ve had a colleague stabbed on the way to work. Countless issues of burglary. I mean, that’s a really difficult backdrop with which to draw talent to your city”
Just lie—the mass media does it, the politicians do it...
Oh yeah, and don’t ever mention the race of the perps...never never never never...
If you don’t talk about it nobody will ever notice.
:-(
We can’t clean up their house until we clean our own.
Eliminate bush league chamber of commerce worshiping republiCAN’Ts from the equasion.
Then we can start changing things.
I just learned that Mark Levin lives in FL. I thought he was from Yankee land!
I hear you.
But I think we don’t have much choice, though.
If we simply surrender government at all levels to the Left, as we have largely done with local elections including everything from Secretary of State to Local Dog Catcher, they leverage it to its fullest.
I despise politics, but I had to join my Republican Town Committee, as small as it is in this Leftist town in a totally blue state, but I had to do something.
Don’t know where it will take me.
But leaving it alone and not getting involved nearly made my town a Sanctuary City, They almost institueted enforced COVID Passports, and did make “Climate Change” a mandated item of ALL town business discussion.
They have done far worse with state, federal, media, educational, and entertainment aspects.
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