This was almost me. In 2021, I was on the @CTA Blue Line when a man dressed in all-black and a shiesty mask walked between the train cars, reached into his backpack, and put a handgun to my head. He didn't rob me, he watched me begin to cry, laughed, then went to the next car. I was almost one of those stories they publish on page 5 of the Tribune, where you go "oh that's too bad" and quickly forget. It is emotionally scarring for even the strongest person.

Today, I avoid the L whenever I can and sometime have anxiety attacks when someone walks between cars. I never reported it because I knew @KimFoxx would never do anything about it. I absolutely do not trust the city's crime statistics. Crimes go unreported, are misclassified in the data, or perhaps even omitted altogether.

This is the reality of living in downtown Chicago, and just one of several violent incidents I have witnessed or narrowly escaped. The massive gang fight in the Jackson Red Line tunnel, the youth that beat up and robbed and an elderly man on the Red Line, the mentally ill man that forced himself on a woman before myself and another passenger physically threw him off the train. I have a dozen more, both disturbing and disgusting, but you get the drift. The transit system is the primary mechanism for spreading crime throughout the city, yet security is nearly totally absent.

Almost every Chicagoan I know have stories like this. Many people in my building do not leave after sundown, and talk of all the things they "used to do at night" 15-20 years ago. Our city could be so much better, but we choose to live like this. This mayoral administration, like the ones that preceded it, punishes good people and rewards the bad. We have come to believe this is normal and must submit to random terror in the name of "social justice."

Chicago is a low trust society that does not have the appropriate social norms to self-regulate its behavior. Hundreds of billions of dollars of public investment over the last few decades have failed to yield anything but the most marginal gains in quality of life, and in many ways (educational performance particularly) are demonstrably worse. Almost every single municipality in the United States obtains much better policy outcomes with a far smaller tax burden and per-capita program expenditures.

Chicago will never improve because security is the precondition for public investment to work. Our public expenditures act as a pretext to loot the productive to fund an ever-expanding class of government sinecures and NGO grifters. Naive progressive policy analysts fail to understand the dark side of human motivation, thinking that some largely symbolic program or policy will be the key to "breaking the cycle," citing the incorrect causal mechanisms. Chicago is a city that believes in 14th chances.

A broad cultural reset is the only way forward. Send in the FBI and National Guard, hire more CPD, do not parole violent offenders, break the gangs. Removing the class of hyperviolent criminals and repeat offenders from society will fuel safety, growth and prosperity the likes which many in the city has never experienced.

Support @FlipChicagoRed, @themodpun, @RaymondALo @AldReilly and others that speak real truth to power. Refuse to let others weaponize your empathy and good nature against you. Demand change or it will happen to you, or someone you love.

We don't have to live like this.

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