By Ray Cardello for July 5, 2022 Season 11 / Post 39

The Fourth of July used to mean something in America. Independence Day used to be a sacred holiday that marked the birth of our great country. Brave citizens banded together and decided that they had tolerated enough of an overbearing ruler and took on the most powerful military in the world. England’s Infantry and Navy were trained, equipped, and had the numbers. If the Revolution was a football game, England was favored by 14. It should have been a blowout.

The colonists, the Patriots, had one element on their side that was not measurable. The Patriots were farmers and shopkeepers with no training, no sophisticated weapons, and few in numbers but fighting for their freedom. To be free of the power of the King and be able to determine their future and direction was the great equalizer.

The history of our birth as a nation is no longer taught to our children, and many are told that Juneteenth and not the Fourth of July is the actual birthday of America. The younger generations, Millenials and Gen-Z, have little feeling of Patriotism. They are taught only the evils of America’s past. This lack of connection to our past makes it easy for younger people to have little respect for the Military or Police. Authority has no meaning.

Illinois was front and center in lawlessness this holiday weekend. From a twenty-one-year-old troubled man dressed as a woman unloading seventy high-power rounds into innocent bystanders enjoying a parade in a Chicago suburb to sixty-eight shooting casualties in Chicago, gunfire was as present as the repeats of fireworks.

Data published Friday by the Chicago Police Department shows 310 homicides and 1,255 shootings in the city through the end of June. Those figures are below the pace set through the first six months of 2021 and 2020. Should we celebrate the improvement or condemn the politicians for Chicago still being a dangerous cesspool? It is a rhetorical question. Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Governor Jay Robert “J. B.” Pritzker should be run out of office or forced to live a weekend on the streets of Chicago without their security details.

These political hacks are the poster children for hypocrisy. They do little to support the Police, favor a low-penalty Justice Department and have little concern for the people they are charged to protect.

Though not of the Chicago crowd, but could be, Stacey Abrams is the epitome of hypocrisy when it comes to the Police. Abrams, who is taking another shot at running for Georgia governor, is currently listed as a board member at the Seattle-based Marguerite Casey Foundation, a private grant-making foundation named after Marguerite Casey, the sister of UPS founder Jim Casey. 

The far-left foundation has repeatedly voiced support for defunding and abolishing the Police. Abrams, who has tried to distance herself from the hardline rhetoric of the #DefundThePolice movement in the past, has received at least $52,500 in income from the foundation, according to her financial disclosures. She also has reported an expense of nearly $500,000 just this year for private security. Abrams lives by the creed, safety for me but not for thee. There are dozens of politicians from the Left sitting in that pew!