The Outstater
‘Chicago Is Indiana’s Fault’
iT CAN BE HOPED that Mayor Brandon Johnson, who this week blamed Indiana for Chicago crime, will be thrown from office the next election cycle. I have my doubts, though, realizing that his message of envy and resentment is a powerful one with a large constituency.
Envy, please know, is a constant in human nature. It fuels the drive to a base denominator where everyone is equally miserable. Communism and Islamism serve as both its abject failures and its crowning glories.
There are two well-researched books that describe envy’s workings. The most recent is Ben Shapiro’s “Lions and Scavengers.” An earlier work is Helmut Schoeck’s classic “Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior.” Both try to explain how religion, codes of moral behavior and the nuclear family have constrained envy and made Western Civilization possible.
When those societal traits atrophy, they argue, you are left with the world’s default setting, that is, a thug like Brandon Johnson at the top and rampant, barbarous crime throughout. For envy, when institutionalized, acts as a personal excuse and a motivational dampener. Economically, it caps a community’s innovation and growth.
So at risk of over simplifying, societies as well as individuals make a choice — a city of Ben Carsons or one of George Floyds.
Now, 60 years into LBJ’s toxic “great” society, envy has coalesced in small minds into a hatred of whites and a founding mythology for blacks. Johnson believes, for instance, that black slaves “built this land” and whites stole it.
That does not deserve serious attention here except to say that the Midwest, on which soil the mayor makes his claim, was settled by the hated whites with only the nominal presence of blacks. (As late as 1837 there were only 77 blacks in Chicago, records show, and 50 years earlier the Northwest Ordinance had banned slavery there.
And if you follow Johnson’s speeches, you know that Hoosiers are said to be at fault for blacks killing blacks on the streets of Chicago because we allow ownership of guns. Indeed we do, and for defense against the tyranny of men like Johnson.
Finally, a point I find myself having to make more often: These settlers, with nothing more than crude tools, transformed the region into the world’s breadbasket, taming a continent in only a couple of generations. The late historian Paul Johnson called it an achievement “unmatched in history.”
It is a fine thing to be sensitive to racial concerns but let’s keep our facts straight.— tcl
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