While Daley Chases Olympics, The City Suffers
ATTENTIONS DIVERTED
While Daley Chases Olympics, The City Suffers
THE DEATH OF CHICAGO TEEN DERRION ALBERT COULD NOT COME AT A MORE INOPPORTUNE TIME FOR MAYOR DALEY AND CRONIES WHO ARE OFF TO COPENHAGEN TO BRING THE 2016 OLYMPICS TO THE CITY.
That sounds cold, doesn't it? It's also the truth.
Violence among the Chicago's high schoolers has become a constant in Chicago's media. But you can read headlines all day long and still not be aggrieved in the same way that witnessing a murder on tape will unsettle you.
Derrion Albert was the sixth Chicago child to die in three weeks. There's been a lot of din on Chicago chat boards about the horror of showing this video, how rude and exploitive it is. Yet none of last school year's 36 murders of Chicago students has brought the calvary like this one.
"This isn't the first time a child has gotten killed around here, but this is the first time all of these people have come out," Marquita McAlister told a Chicago columnist.
Another constant on the boards and blogs: the question of why the city is even chasing the games when its own house is not in order.
Whole websites have sprung up to defeat the Mayor's quest for the 2016 Summer Olympics.
According to an open letter to President Obama published Monday on Gapers Block, "While funds were nowhere to be found for basic services, the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid committee, the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois lined up nearly $2 billion in taxpayer funds for the 2016 Olympics. A recent WGN/Chicago Tribune poll found that less than half of Chicagoans support the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid, and that 84 percent were opposed to using tax revenue to cover any losses incurred."
The anti-Olympic sentiment stems from ordinary citizens' lack of trust in the city's leadership. Corruption has become commonplace, and neither investigative reporting nor criminal prosecution puts the slimeballs out of office.
Personally, I don't think that you can fix the self-hatred evident on this video with $2 billion dollars. But love and attention might.
So I wonder if, rather than flying off to Copenhagen, a visit to Chicago's Southside from President Obama would help this city even more than all the Olympic gold would bring.
