Can Lori Lightfoot really make Chicago a less violent place this Memorial Day?

Lori Lightfoot hasn’t even been mayor of Chicago for one full week, and she’s already promising what may be an overly ambitious goal – eliminating the urban violence that is a Chicago embarrassment every Memorial Day holiday weekend. 

New mayor hopes to put her mark on city's Memorial Day safety

Which sounds nice. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Lori Lightfoot could really make Chicago a nicer, less violent place to be. Of course, this opens her up to criticism from every single smart-aleck (many harsher than myself) who will now try to hang every single violent crime that takes place this weekend on Lightfoot herself.

SO WHAT IS it Lightfoot has in mind?

Basically, it’s a marketing campaign. “Our City, Our Safety,” it’s being called. What it means is that the mayor wants us to get off our fat behinds and DO something,

In the form of attending one of the many events being held in neighborhoods across the city. Which almost reminds me of that old English proverb that says, “Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop.”

Does this make Lightfoot the equivalent of Chicago’s granny, spewing out sayings that basically mean we ought to make ourselves useful for a change instead of sitting around doing nothing?

Could events such as Mole de Mayo festival play a role in reducing … 

SERIOUSLY, THE CITY has a list of hundreds of events taking place from Friday through Monday. The theory being that if we’re doing something and perhaps even enjoying ourselves, we’re less likely to get ourselves involved in something stupid that will cause tempers to flare and lead to the potential for someone to pull out a weapon and use it.

… Memorial Day violence?

Is it our civic duty, then, to attend the Mole de Mayo festival in the Pilsen neighborhood, or any one of the many other events taking place in Chicago this weekend.

Maybe you’d rather check out the Lane Tech (as in high school) Carnival, or one of the many places that are doing film screenings (Lilo and Stitch will be showing Saturday at 6800 N. Western Ave., as an example).

What it basically sounds like is that Lightfoot wants to use what I’ve always considered to be one of Chicago’s biggest pluses to her advantage (the mass of activities taking place at any given time).

ANYBODY WHO’S SERIOUSLY bored in Chicago isn’t trying hard enough to find something interesting or enlightening to do.

Now I don’t know if I feel compelled to check out the Mole de Mayo festival in Pilsen, although I’ll admit I went last year and it was an interesting experience stuffing my face with a dish I consider my personal favorite.

Although I feel compelled to try to find something new to do to occupy my time this holiday weekend. And part of that time may well be in some sort of serious contemplation of those people who served in our nation’s military and wound up losing their lives as a result.

That’s enough bloodshed to have to think about, without having to contemplate the number of people killed or wounded (it could wind up being several dozen) in incidents that usually compete with each other in terms of just how insipid they are.

ALMOST AS THOUGH some people are eager to see a life lost in the most pathetic and wasteful manner possible. My own reporter-type days saw me write many a story about someone who happened to be sitting on their porch when they got struck by stray gunfire.

Various types of police will be in force this weekend. Photos by Gregory Tejeda

To try to cope with the incidents that are inevitable this weekend, the Chicago Police say they plan to have an extra 1,200 patrol officers on duty – with some 50 of them riding the Chicago Transit Authority buses and “L” trains to try to reduce the number of moments where someone merely trying to get themselves somewhere wind up being hurt or killed.

While a summer mobile patrol of about 100 officers will be working the parks and Lake Michigan shoreline. The last thing we need is someone killed during a quarrel breaking out at a traditional holiday “cookout” gone awry.

Which may sound like quite a force being put to the streets to deal with potential violence. The reality, though, is that it will only take one child getting caught in someone’s crossfire to taint the holiday weekend – no matter how much Lightfoot tries to reduce it.

  -30-

How un-American can we get; spraying cemetery swastikas for Memorial Day

I feel sorry for those cemetery work crews in Glen Carbon – an Illinois-based suburb of St. Louis – who had to spend their Saturday sweating it out in the summer-time heat scrubbing swastikas that were spray-painted on head stones at a local cemetery.

Who in 'right' mind wants to bring this back?

For officials with the Sunset Hill Cemetery found headstones vandalized Saturday morning, and they wanted to be sure the mess was cleaned up prior to Monday.

THE LAST THING that anybody wanted was the symbol of Nazi-era Germany defacing the grave markers – particularly those of people who might have served in the military back in the World War II era.

On the day we pay tribute to those soldiers, sailors, air corps and marines who fought in the many wars our nation has taken part in, it is sad that we have some nincompoop out there who thinks it’s funny to deface graves with the symbol of the “enemy” whom we fought against.

Either that, or perhaps we have an idiot who thinks we fought a war against the “wrong” enemy! Believe it or not, there are those with enough screws loose that their vision of what “America” is all about would have had us aligned with the Axis Powers of old.

And the odd thing is, many of them have enough of a militaristic attitude that would have them believe such a viewpoint is what this country ought to be about.

SOMETHING I’D THINK the people who actually fought in that particular war would find particularly repulsive. But then again, the surviving veterans of World War II are such that they’ve reached their 90s in age – if they’re even still alive.

Meaning many of us don’t have a direct memory of what that conflict was about. Which is why we get those endless studies showing young people of today don’t comprehend Hitler or the Holocaust. Maybe they think such stories are more examples of “fake news,” because, after all, nobody could have been that delusional or vicious in their behavior.

So yes, I’m bothered by the stories that came out of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the vandalized cemetery – although it also seems some houses near the cemetery also got tagged with the swastika. Which almost reminds me of that old “All in the Family” episode where someone tagged the front door of Archie Bunker’s bungalow with a swastika – and he tried to cover it up with a U.S. flag, only to be found out because he hung the flag on the door backwards!

Happening in real-life now as it happened on TV then

Some 1,300 military veterans are buried in that particular cemetery, and officials plan a noon-hour ceremony on Monday to pay tribute to those individuals.

SO IT WOULD seem that somebody was hoping to make a visual statement – one about what they think would “Make America Great Again” perhaps? And if you think I’m exaggerating such a viewpoint, consider the anonymous rants to be found on the Internet.

I literally found one person who thinks that such vandalism is to be expected because of the disrespect being shown by, “governments taking down and destroying monuments and history.”

As though not considering someone like Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee to be heroic is the same thing. The actual comparison would be someone lighting crosses ablaze at the remains of old “colored” cemeteries.

On the positive side, police in Edwardsville actually came up with security camera video that captured grainy images of the suspected vandal in the area at the alleged time of the incident.

THERE EVEN HAS been an arrest. Although just what kinds of criminal charges that individual will face remains to be determined. I’m pretty sure, though, that there will be some people willing to make a martyr out of the individual – whose idea of a political “statement” involved running around in the dark with an aerosol spray can of black paint.

Don't see where swastika fits in

Personally, I’d rather remember on this Memorial Day the individuals who fought against such ideals that these nitwits are superficially supporting.

It’s like some people want to keep refighting the old wars – and they’re counting on our apathy as a society to permit them to have a chance at victory.

Without it, our “American” ideals (which are nowhere as narrow as they want to make them out to be) are what will continue to prevail!

  -30-

Memorial Day; ‘yea’ or ‘nae’ for those who do their military service?

I never served in any branch of the military; that fact doesn’t make me the least bit unique.

How many will gather at Chicago's Vietnam Vets' memorial? How many even know it exists? Photographs by Gregory Tejeda

There are many who for whatever reason manage to avoid a stint in the Army or any other military organization, and certainly don’t think our lives are any less complete as a result.

OF COURSE, THERE also are those in our society who made a point of enlisting the first chance they got, and wind up thinking of their time in uniform and being among those who “serve their country” as the high point of their lives!

Some even come away with thinking their military record entitles them to prime treatment for the remainder of their lives.

We have a serious schism in our society; often viewing various issues quite differently. And not just a matter of whether we think Donald Trump is a “great American” or a “pompous fool” totally unfit to be carrying the title of Commander-in-Chief of our nation’s military!

That split includes how essential we think it is that one have a military service record as part of their permanent record, or how much "lip service" they pay to the concept -- I attended a Catholic mass that included a musical tribute to the armed services in its choir's Sunday program; and while many were eager to support the idea, only a tiny minority of the congregation admitted to actually having served. Which gets down to the essence of the direction we think our society ought to be headed.

No dogs allowed?

THERE ARE THOSE people who will say that one reason, if not the primary reason, that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were unfit to be president is because they never served in the military (and in the case of Clinton used many of the legal maneuvers people of that era engaged in to avoid a call-up to active duty).

Some of an older generation remember back to the military draft, and think that forcing people of various economic and social classes to interact helped ease the societal split that now exists.

Posters or helmet -- which is 'your' side?

Although others, including those who managed to avoid military service, would argue that the very concept of having done a stretch in the military puts a person into a mindset that makes them too narrow and unfit to address the serious problems confronting our nation, and our world.

Perhaps we all ought to be engaged in something more than blind faith in forcing esoteric concepts of what one wants to define as patriotism by a trip out to the cemetery to pay tribute to someone who was unfortunate to have lost their life during their military service.

SOME OF US like to talk about the “ultimate sacrifice” those young men made, I’m sure many of them could have contributed something equally worthwhile to society had they had a chance at a long- and full-life.

While many of those who these days do enlist in the military often do so because their options in life are limited; and that military stretch may be their best option for preparing for an adult life.

I remember in my own case, my mother would have been appalled if I had seriously talked about enlisting. I remember when Army recruiters sniffed around me when I was 16 and in high school, she gave them the cold shoulder.

In my case, that probably was a wise direction. I did make the most of a college education, and it stirred me in the right direction toward what I wanted to do (yes, I actually figured out as far back as age 13 that I wanted to be a reporter-type person). I resisted the Army’s marketing pleas to “be all you can be.”

WHILE I HAD cousins who did stints of military service, and it helped them come up with the funds to pay for future education options they took on or taught them some skills used later in life. It worked out well for them, and I’m sure for many of the individuals who have done military service.

Easier to eulogize past conflicts?

My point in stating all this is that I’m not about to hold it over anybody’s head that I didn’t have to use the military to get ahead in life. Meaning I’m not about to defer to those who want to act as though the fact that they did a stretch in uniform somehow makes them superior.

I actually find such an attitude to be arrogant and unfit for anyone to have in our society. Particularly because it places a view that one can claim superiority for doing something that may well have been their only realistic option in life.

And on this Memorial Day when we pay tribute to the contributions of military personnel throughout our history, perhaps I should even throw in that having such an attitude perhaps even qualifies as un-American!

  -30-

Holiday ‘blues’ leaves many for dead; but not in a way we’d honor and respect

It was Memorial Day on Monday, and we were supposed to be paying tribute to those people who served in the military and wound up making the “ultimate sacrifice,” as some people like to phrase it.

Yet I wonder if we’d have been better off paying some sort of tribute to those of us Chicagoans who wound up getting caught in the crossfire, so to speak, and being shot – if not outright killed.

FOR WHILE MANY people wanted to talk about long-ago casualties in places like Khe Sahn, Normandy Beach (we’re only a couple of weeks shy of the 71^st anniversary of D-Day) or Fallujah, certain of our own streets seem to be just as deadly.

For it seems that during the holiday weekend, there were nine people killed by gunfire and at least 34 others wounded. Unless you prefer to believe the Chicago Tribune, in which case, it was 41 people.

There’s always the chance that the figures could go higher by the time you actually read this, since one of those wounded may wind up becoming a fatality.

Now I’m not implying there’s something special about these holiday weekends that causes more people to become fatalities. I recall my own days of full-time police reporting back when I was with the now-defunct City News Bureau. It was back then that I learned to dread holiday weekends.

NOT BECAUSE I cared about the fact that one year, I worked every single major holiday that “real people” were given off as paid holidays.

But it was because of the tendency to pay extra close attention to every single incident of mayhem that occurs at such times. Not only running totals of every single auto accident, but of just about any incident that occurs in someone’s death.

Sometimes, I wonder if such attention somehow causes higher numbers of incidents. Or maybe we’re just made more aware of how deadly conditions can be in certain parts of Chicago.

Because it becomes way too easy to ignore for those of us who don’t live in certain parts of Chicago – which a Tribune story on Monday managed to define as being from the north end of the Bronzeville neighborhood south into the Englewood neighborhood.

THE PLACES WHERE the “Chiraq” label isn’t all that much of an exaggeration, and where our city officials wish they didn’t have to devote so much time and attention.

The image many of us want of Chicago

Better for them if they could think the seedy side of Chicago is the so-called “Bundy Fountain” that foreign tourists ask to see, and which the rest of us know as Buckingham Fountain.

It would be sad if it turned out that Memorial Day went into the mindset of a significant number of Chicagoans as a bloodbath. Since it seems several of the shootings and at least two of the fatalities were on Monday proper.

The day that some people are devoting to trying out a special sauce to go with their holiday barbecues will be the day that some families remember as the one where a loved one died.

ALTHOUGH I’M SURE it won’t be thought of that way. In fact, I’m sure some people will want to think of such a thought as being overly morbid. Perhaps even subversive.

They’d rather think of death on this holiday weekend in the abstract – as in something that occurred on a battlefield overseas and where noble words about “honor” and “duty” can be tossed about.

 

The great shame of the bloodshed that occurred in Chicago this past weekend is that many of these were young people – the fatalities were as young as 15 and the wounded included a 4-year-old girl.

The way some view holiday's death

People whose lives were cut off prior to reaching their prime; before they could even have a chance to serve their country and possibly make that “ultimate sacrifice” that would probably be the only way that would cause some in our society to recognize their worth as human beings.

  -30-

EXTRA: It’s all a matter of perspective

Five dead. Or was it six?

Fifteen wounded. Or was it really 10? Or should we be adding another three people who took hits Monday morning?

IT’S ALL ABOUT being able to offer up a holiday body count this Memorial Day holiday weekend. As though people will find it significant to know how many people got caught up in the crossfire; and how fortunate they were to not be among them!

It actually reminds me about my old City News Bureau days knowing that holiday weekends required a special duty – calling up assorted police departments every three hours to put together a running list of how many auto accidents had occurred, along with how many people had actually been hurt or killed.

It makes me wonder if I were a City News kid today, if I’d be doing a body count story instead.

At the very least, we’d have more definitive numbers to rely on.

BECAUSE I COULDN’T help but notice the Chicago Sun-Times story that had five dead and 15 wounded. Compared to the Associated Press dispatch that had six dead and 10 wounded.

Although I found it odd that the AP dispatch attributed information to the Sun-Times story.

The one fact to consider is that those figures were supposedly just for Chicago, the city proper – with one of the shootings being someone who got hit by the police. Published reports gave us accounts of three more shot Monday morning in suburban Dolton.

Literally people who were outside their homes trying to enjoy a Memorial Day holiday when they got caught in crossfire from two other people who happened to be passing through the neighborhood – one in his car and the other on bicycle.

Focusing on different casualties

I’M NOT SURE who to believe in terms of totals, although I’m not sure it really matters. Focusing on the totals has the effect of trivializing the violence. Does it really matter if it’s five or six?

There’s also the fact that the overall total is less than the totals we got a few weekends ago – remember the 36 people shot in a single weekend?

Do you think it consoles the family and friends of any of this weekend’s victims that this weekend’s total came to less than that weekend?

  -30-

Chicago baseball teams seen in ‘mirror’ worse (and better) than they appear

Since I personally could care less about the Indianapolis 500 auto race, perhaps it is odd that I have an automobile reference to my view about baseball.

But it is with my own ‘rear view mirror’ that I’m looking upon the fact that we’re one-third of the way through the 2012 season, and we’re at the point (Memorial Day holiday weekend) where it finally becomes relevant to look at the standings and figure out who is good, who is bad, and who is just downright butt-ugly awful.

TRYING TO LOOK at the standings any sooner is just pointless. There just haven’t been enough games played until now to get any real sense of what is happening. Perhaps it is because I remember the season a few years ago when the Cleveland Indians began with an 11-1 won-loss record and had everybody wetting their pants with glee.

A couple of weeks later, that record was 13-13 before the ballclub fell into its routine of a completely forgettable season.

We haven’t had any such wackiness in Chicago. White Sox pitcher Phil Humber’s perfect game really could turn out to be the highlight for Chicago baseball in 2012 – although I already sense all those Cubs fans who are going to tell me about Kerry Wood’s farewell game (pitching to Dayan Viciedo and striking him our).

Whoop de doo!?! Somehow, I don’t envision Viciedo is living with the “shame” of such a moment. He’s probably already forgotten about it. Perhaps something else will happen at the Wrigley Field scene later this year to make everybody else forget it too.

PERSONALLY, I DON’T know what to think about 2012 at this point. Because I can’t help but think of the rear view mirror and that saying decaled over the glass.

Nothing we see right now is what it appears to be.

I see that on Memorial Day White Sox fans can wake up and say they root for a ballclub with a winning record and one that is only a half-game out of first place (the Sox have one more loss than the Cleveland Indians, and both have won 26 games thus far).

They’re in a pennant race! And it has to be a bonus that during the past week they completed a sweep of the first place Indians, to go along with taking two of three games from the Minnesota Twins, just after taking those three ballgames from the Cubs.

AN 8-1 RECORD during the past 10 days. Impressive. Then again, even the worst major league ballclubs are capable of going on tears for a short stretch. Who knows?

Maybe THIS is the 2012 season highlight – White Sox fans were deluded into thinking that the team is a real contender for a division title (which I still say doesn’t mean much, a League championship and World Series appearance are what count).

Perhaps it is because I saw how hard the White Sox pitching got hit during the past weekend, and only won those games because the Indians pitchers got smacked about even harder. This just strikes me as a ballclub that will fade around the time the Chicago Bears go to training camp.

Which means we should probably enjoy things now.

AS FOR THE Chicago Cubs, I got my chuckles from a Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist this week who speculated as to whether baseball wunderkind Theo Epstein appreciated the irony of leaving a winning organization with the Boston Red Sox (last place in their own division as of Monday) to come to what could be the worst team in baseball.

Yes. The Cubs would be one-half game behind the Twins in the standings, if baseball standings were ranked first through thirtieth – without regard for divisions or leagues.

But they’re not.

And I honestly don’t believe the Cubs are as bad as that 15-32 won-loss record they had on Memorial Day.

IF THIS PAST week may be the White Sox’ season highlight, it definitely has to be the low point for the Cubs – who after their 10-4 loss on Sunday to the Pittsburgh Pirates have lost 12 ballgames in a row!

The carnage has to end! Heck, even I’m hoping that the Cubs can manage to eke out a victory on Monday against the San Diego Padres, just so we can quit thinking of “historically awful” and go back to thinking of the team as disappointingly mediocre.

Which is what I really see when I look at the Cubs ballclub. Nobody could be that incredibly awful – although a part of me has to admit to thinking that anyone who would pay the $100-plus prices that are being charged for the Wrigley Field bleachers these days (for the premium games, that is) is a bit of a sucker. Perhaps they need a bit of “reality” to bring them back to Earth.

And in the end, I still think that level at season’s end will be a White Sox team that is somewhere around 81 wins (the .500 winning percentage point) and a Cubs team that flies the white flag with the blue “W” 75 times during 2012.

  -30-

Has Memorial Day holiday become more about the burgers than the soldiers?

I went and got myself a haircut Sunday, and while making sure to trim my sideburns evenly, the hair-stylist hit me with the question about my holiday plans.

“Are you going to barbecue?”

NOW THE STRAIGHTFORWARD answer to that question is, “I don’t know.” It will depend on the weather (if it is as bad Monday as it was Sunday, then I doubt it), and also the mood of my father – I’m likely to spend the bulk of the day checking up to make sure he and my step-mother are okay.

But there’s something about the question that annoyed me somewhat; and not just because it was a part of the mindless chit-chat that barbers feel the need to engage in.

It’s the idea that the reason we’re getting a holiday (one of the six major ones that results in an extra day off from work for many people, no mail delivery and a waiver of the rules requiring that we feed the parking meters) is so that we can drag out the coals and slap a few patties of ground beef (or some meat-like substance) over the heat.

We might as well re-name the holiday “Weber Grill Day.” The all-American vision of a charred hot dog or a bratwurst being stuffed into a bun for our consumption.

BE HONEST. THAT vision will be in more people’s heads than any vision involving military personnel.

Now I’m not about to preach for the military. I never served, and feel fortunate that I was never in a position where I felt forced to serve (which is what I honestly think of those young people now who use the military to come up with the money to pay for a college education in the future).

But I do have cousins and uncles who did stints in the military at various points of time during the past few decades – including some who served in Vietnam and during the first incarnation of an Iraq War (remember 1990?).

So while I happen to think that many military veterans organizations lay it on a little thick with the public ceremonies they conducted both during the weekend and on Monday (I understand Mayor Rahm Emanuel became a bit teary-eyed while attending such a ceremony in Chicago, while my relatives who served don’t go around telling ‘war’ stories), I find the apathetic viewpoint to be even more reprehensible.

INSOFAR AS MY own family, I am fortunate enough to be able to say that all of those members who served came back home and were able to have a life after their military service. We won’t tell tales on Monday of a lost brother or cousin and wonder ‘what might have been’ had he not been lost in combat. We’re fortunate in that regard, and I feel for those who can’t say the same.

But for those people whose biggest concern on Monday is making sure they get the right brand of barbecue sauce for whatever it is they try to cook, I hope I don’t run into many of those people.

Because my level of contempt may well just cause me to have an outburst that I likely will regret in the future. If anything, I believe that Monday shouldn’t be much of a holiday celebration at all.

It ought to be a day of quiet, introspective thought. We should have to contemplate, even if for just a few, brief moments, what our life and our society would be like if certain aspects had gone differently in the past. How much better off are we because of the sacrifices of past military action.

THERE HAVE BEEN times in our history when brute force has had to be used to uphold an ideal. The problem becomes when people think we’re celebrating the acts of brute force, rather than the ideals that our United States is based upon.

Of course, looking around me while I stopped off at a supermarket later in the afternoon on Sunday, it would seem to me that few people had any of this in mind. Finding the best price on pop, or deciding how thin to chop the onions so they don’t dissolve on the grill was the biggest concern.

Me, I’m hoping to have a moment to think about my cousins or uncles (whom I most likely will NOT actually see on Monday) who weren’t as fortunate as I was to have options besides the military. Today’s the day they deserve a moment of my attention.

That is, when I’m not munching on a burger.

  -30-

Did Obama pick bad time to visit Chicago?

There are those of us Chicagoans who have been getting on the case of President Barack Obama for not continuing to spend time at his Hyde Park neighborhood home, or anywhere in the Chicago area. So you’d think that his decision to have the family spend the Memorial Day holiday weekend “back home” would cause the criticism to pipe down.

Forget it.

BECAUSE NOW OBAMA is getting criticized by people who think that Memorial Day is one of those moments that he OUGHT TO BE REQUIRED to be near the District of Columbia.

Specifically, there are those people who are upset that the president of the United States will not be participating in the Memorial Day ceremonies to be held Monday at Arlington National Cemetery – the place where many veterans of every military conflict our nation has ever engaged in are buried.

We’re hearing the political rhetoric that the president is showing disrespect to the military – even though his plans for Monday include spending some time at a military cemetery.

It just won’t be “ARLINGTON, Va. – “ as the dateline on Monday’s news coverage of Obama. Instead, we’ll get the ubiquitous “ELWOOD, Ill. –,” which is the home of the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery, which is having its 11th annual Memorial Day ceremony – albeit the first ever where a sitting president has bothered to show up.

IT SOUNDS TOO much like people who want to think the whole of our society revolves around the District of Columbia (which is a nice place to visit for a few days at a time, although somewhat depressing if you actually have to live there) can’t accept the fact that there is a “rest of the country” that also will be observing the holiday this weekend.

The presidential appearance is, at most, a few seconds observed on television, in between the segment about the local holiday parade and the line of scores telling us how the White Sox managed to botch another ball game.

Should we really get worked up that Obama had included on his schedule for the national holiday that pays tribute to those who defended this country a ceremony at a place named for a president who held the nation together at a time when forces tried literally to split it into two?

To me, that sounds more appropriate than being in a place that was once the home estate of a military leader who rejected Lincoln’s pleas to work with him in holding the nation together, and was willing to join forces with those who would have torn it apart.

NOW THOSE OF you who have Confederacy apologist tendencies, don’t get worked up. Not yet anyway. Because the people who are all upset that Obama would use a Chicago-area cemetery (Elwood is located on Interstate 55 just past Joliet) to honor soldiers and Memorial Day are not the ones who bother me the most.

What really ticked me off was when I learned of the fact that some people in our society are so miffed about Obama using Will County, Ill., for official Memorial Day tributes that they were planning their own counter-protest, so to speak.

We’re not quite talking about the Ku Klux Klan, but we are talking about the kind of people with racial hangups that they join groups that feed off much of the imagery and nit-wit philosophy of white supremacy.

If they had got their way, we’d be having a counter-protest at a rural site just south of Mokena, Ill. (one of those towns that comprises the outer fringes of the Chicago area).

THINK ABOUT IT, if you will.

A sitting president wants to come to an area cemetery to pay tribute to those who served their nation, yet these activists who like to think they are “real Americans” and “true” patriots find that act to be offensive.

So much so that they talk of holding a rally to express their disgust with the very thought that Obama would think himself worthy of paying respect to military people.

I guess racial hangups overcome patriotism, although I’d argue such hangups are probably what is most “un-American” about these people.

WE SHOULD BE thankful that the owner of the site where these people wanted to hold their rally (officially being billed as “Nordic Fest” to give it an ethnic flair, even though I suspect most of these people have no true concept of what they really are or where they originated from) changed his mind and revoked permission for his land to be used.

Then again, reports in the Herald-News of Joliet indicate his big reason for revoking permission was that he didn’t like the nasty publicity that was being derived. All of those “liberal, out-of-touch-with-society” reporter-types were calling him to ask about the “Klan” rally being held on his land.

Otherwise, Will County literally would have become the place on Monday where the white supremacists protested the fact that a president would pay respect to military dead.

-30-