Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina Catholic Church in the same neighborhood as Simeon, is outraged at the violence.
“What kind of crazy day do we live in, where our children are afraid to come home and go to school?” Pfleger says.
Outside of his church, Pfleger flies the American flag upside down ”” something the U.S. Flag Code states should only be done as a signal of distress and a dire need for help.
“Well, this is a dire need,” Pfleger says. “This is a distress signal we’re putting up saying we need help. We want to sound the alarm; we want a call for helping us deal with children being shot down in our city streets.”
I caught this last night in the car on the way to an appointment–heartbreaking. Read or listen to it all.
This is, I think, the same Catholic priest who preached inflammatory sermons at Trinity UCC, Obama’s former church. So many decades of rage have produced such sparse results in the lives of the young people who grow up on the mean streets. I get no sense of what Pfleger and others want done other than, as some quoted in the story, gun control in Chicago, which is not a root cause cure. Surely faith and standards and personal discipline would be the most constructive?
He is the very same priest, Katherine.
If I was a member of the Ku Klux Klan I might start to gleefully believe that the leaders of that group and other racist organizations had been acting with Machiavellian subtly and intrigue behind the scenes of the liberal, feminist organizations calling for the remaking of society.
Because what slavery could not destroy. What Jim Crow could not destroy. What bone breaking poverty and labor could not destroy. What racist night riders and church bombings and fire hoses and lynchings and a reign of terror could not destroy. The great failed social experiment has destroyed.
What have they destroyed? They have destroyed the black family with a mother and father rearing children together to become people of strong moral character. (and no they have not totally destroyed it but where it matters the most as a bulkwark against a toxic environment they have pretty much made it toast.)
The replacement of the black father with the welfare check, the replacement of the black mother with the daycare worker, all are coming home to roost in a culture of violence, nihiliism and whoredom. These ae the things which thrive in anarchy and let’s face it for poor blacks the fatherless family is going to be an anarchistic family.
Without guidance, without rules, without real manhood to emulate at home young black men are searching for those things and too often find them in people or groups who corrupt those things, keeping the appearance of them but twisting the substance into a blighted horror. Do you think gangs would be so successful if they were not selling a product that these young men and women wanted?
Society said fathers do not matter. That single parenthood was equal and in many cases superior to the nuclear family. That women could be everyone to her children as long as the State wrote out a check once a month to help her out financially.
Well society was wrong and it will be a very long time before we can undo the damage. And if I were a black person that would make me angrier than the fact my ancestors were once slaves.