Amid all the talk of defunding and disbanding police even as mayhem reigns all over the country, I’ve been thinking again about the Frank Capra Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life.” What if, I’ve wondered, the Left could experience life in the anarchic paradise they claim to crave?
Little did I suspect answers would be provided this quickly. One was provided by a shooting in CHOP last Saturday that left 19-year-old Lorenzo Anderson, a black teen, dead. Anderson, who was shot in the arm and chest by a so-far unidentified gunman in a black SUV, didn’t die from his wounds immediately and, in fact, might have survived. But when police and an emergency crew attempted to enter the zone, they were turned away at the “border” by protesters linking arms.
On Monday, Seattle Mayor Jerry Durkan, who had coined the phrase “summer of love,” became one of the first of the Kool-Aid drinkers to see the light. She has announced that order — meaning the law — will be restored to the area.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
But an even more hopeful sign was provided by the reaction of Lorenzo Anderson’s godmother, who told station Q13 that she was “outraged, appalled and disgusted” over her godson’s death, and wants answers from the protesters.
“You just messed up your whole movement because you should’ve sat up here and been protecting him,” she said, addressing the protesters. “You guys let a black life go in your so-called ‘Black Lives Matter’ protest on the street. Come on now. I’m trying to understand, why wouldn’t you let 911 medics in to help him? You all picked him up. He could’ve still been breathing. We don’t know that.”
Across the continent in New York, families awoke to the reality of a world without police. Following the disbanding of the NYPD’s plainclothes anti-crime unit, the city witnessed a sharp rise in deadly shootings, the vast majority of them in predominantly black neighborhoods.
But nowhere did reality hit harder than in Chicago, where grief-stricken neighbors held a prayer vigil for 3-year-old Mekhi James, who was killed by a bullet meant for his father. Rev. Ira Acree of Greater St. John Bible Church told the Chicago Tribune:
A line was crossed. This is a horrific Father’s Day. This 3-year-old baby lost his life. … I could not pastor this community and not say something. We say black lives matter, but we’re here to say black baby lives matter more.
Nicole Weekly, who lives on the same block where the drive-by shooting occurred, told reporters, “What is happening with our kids? Our babies can’t be getting killed. What kind of future do we have if our babies are getting killed?”
Another woman acknowledged a bitter reality seldom heard issuing from the mouths of Democrats and that is that the leading cause of death among blacks is homicide at the hands of other blacks.
