danger in the city

While I was away from Chicago from 1963 to 1987 I read the Chicago papers when I could get them, and they were always full of, murders.  When I did move back I admit to being leery and thinking I would only stay a few years and make some money and move to a different part of the country that I hadn't seen before, that is if I got out of the city alive.  When I bought my condo in the downtown tower I knew that I would never leave here alive, but that was because I would never want to leave, not that I would get shot.

As a good liberal (I don't mind using the word, but if I were to choose to run for election of something I would deny it and call myself a progressive) I feel bad about the daily murders in our poverty stricken neighborhoods, but walking around downtown and in most neighborhoods, I feel perfectly safe.  Well not perfectly safe, you never know when a meteor is going to come crashing into your cranium.

The Old Dog was saying Friday night that he thought maybe you needed a gun in rural areas to protect yourself because the police were far away, further, he speculated, there was probably more crime in rural areas because well, it is all stretched out, miles and miles, as they used to like to say in Texas, of miles and miles.  Fortunately neither of us owns a Sooper Dooper phone, so we continued the argument into the night, though subjects were changed frequently.  Anyway this morning I looked it up, and the bigger the city, the more per capita crime.   https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-in-crime-rate-in-rural-and-urban-areas.

There is a movie from our youth where grasshoppers eat radioactive tomatoes from an experiment at the University of Illinois and grow to giant size and start heading north because the first thing you want to do when you grow to giant size is topple tall buildings.  The military has a solution, but as the science fella says in the trailer, "You can't drop an atom bomb, on Chicago."

So I don't worry about atom bombs or, truth be told, those meteors.  Terrorist attacks likewise.  I find it hard to believe that people actually fear for their individual lives because of terrorism, though from reading the papers I see that there are some, just as I see that there are Trumpists though I know hardly a one.

I mean what are the odds?  I am far more likely to get run over by a car speeding down Wacker Drive, and you more likely to go off the road in that rickety truck of yours, and those cigs that we sneak are far more likely to do us in than any Koran quoting dingbat. 

A gun isn't going to protect either of us from death by traffic or a lump in our lungs, and most likely it isn't going to protect you from another gun either.  If somebody is going to shoot you, they aren't likely going to growl "Draw," before they shoot.  That time I got mugged, I guess ideally I could have whirled on my attackers and brandished my big iron, and they would have scattered and my wallet would have remained in my pocket.

On the other hand they may have all pulled out their big irons, and I would have been hopelessly outgunned, there were three of them.  Or they could have rushed me and taken the gun and used it on me.  Or maybe I could have killed one or two of them, but geez, that would be robbing me of my sleep for the rest of my life.

I know that you don't read the papers much so maybe you never heard that George Will has stopped being a Republican.  He went wherever he had to go and changed his registration from Republican to Unaffiliated,  What a drama queen.  He could have just not voted for Trump even if he was a registered Republican.  As I have said a number of times I don't see the relevance of whether somebody is really officially a real Republican or merely somebody who votes Republican in every election.  You speak of those party rosters, but come election day those rosters don't mean squat, the only numbers that count are the numbers from the ballot box.

Reading those papers that you don't get around to reading, the big girl is leading in every recent poll, but surprisingly for me, by only like 5 or 10 percentage points.  But I did see one poll lately where head to head she beats Trump by 10, but when they include the greens and the 'Tarians! she is leading only by 1, with the greens taking 6 and the 'Tarians! 10.  I suspect that 6 for the greens comes from pouting Bernie Babies who I expect to come around before election day, and the 10 for the 'Tarians! is coming from the ilk of George Will and yourself and is relatively pretty solid.

And speaking of the 'Tarians! they don't seem to have gained much traction from that CNN town hall.  I did see lately that they have come out in favor of Brexit, under the principle that each country must be free to follow its own destiny, which to me is pure crap, because it's not like every country is wandering around in some forest, they are all living in the same house, and what they do effects all the other countries so our destinies are all intertwined.