The Patriot Post® · Expendable Children

Last Sunday, seven-year-old Jaslyn Adams was shot to death at a McDonald’s drive-thru in the Homan Square neighborhood of Chicago. Her father, 29-year-old Jontae Adams, was also shot and seriously wounded. According to police, Jaslyn, who has three siblings, was hit “multiple times” in the body, and her dad was struck in the torso. A McDonald’s employee who asked not to be named told reporters that two people got out of a gray car in the drive-thru and started shooting at Adams’s car.

Chances are good that by the time one reads this column, this atrocity will have been swept aside by the news media. A news media that sees neither a narrative that can be exploited nor a ratings enhancer that would keep people watching.

But there is far more to this story than that. “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic,” Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin allegedly once stated. And much like Jaslyn Adams, a similar number of tragedies quickly becomes statistics in the city of Chicago, where just this year alone 864 people have been shot and 163 people have been killed as of April 14.

Both numbers represent a dramatic increase in a city where more than 4,100 people were shot and 769 people were killed last year.

Unsurprisingly, much of the violence is gang-related. In 2020, Chicago Police Department Superintendent David Brown stated there were 117,000 gang members in the city who are part of 55 known gangs. Of those 55 gangs, there are 747 factions that have 2,500 subsets. “Any day of the week, any hour of the day,” Brown added, there are “several hundred gang conflicts related to that 117,000 gang members.”

The demographic breakdowns of the victims and perpetrators of the violence are equally unsurprising. In 2020, 80% of Chicago’s “gun violence” victims were black. Between 2010 and July 8, 2020, 4,374 blacks were killed in the Windy City. Nationally, more than 90% of black homicide victims are killed by a black offender.

Police believe Jaslyn’s murder was gang-related, because less than three hours later, two people were shot in their car at a Popeyes restaurant in Humboldt Park, which investigators believe is connected to the McDonald’s shooting. One of the onlookers at the McDonald’s shooting expressed what ought to be a wholly untenable reality. “Unbelievable. They did this in front of all those cameras,” the man who asked to remain anonymous stated. “These kids are getting bold.”

Getting bold? These “kids” have been bold for a long time. In 2011, data officially released by the Chicago Police revealed that 90% of the city’s murder victims were male, and 53% were between the ages of 17 and 25. This year? The number of shootings and shooting victims in Chicago in the month of March alone are at their highest levels in four years.

In a better nation, the reality that certain neighborhoods in Chicago and other American cities are arguably less safe than war zones would elicit serious introspection and pushback. In this one, one either advances an ideologically driven agenda that serves the “systemic racism” narrative, or one is wholly expendable.

Jaslyn Adams and the thousands of other Chicagoans killed and wounded?

Statistics, one and all.

And it’s going to get worse. Murder is up in every major city across America, even as clueless progressive politicians call for defunding police forces. Even worse, their media handmaidens push an utterly false narrative about systemic police brutality, turn thugs into martyrs, pretend seven months of arson, looting, and murder were mostly protests that “intensified,” and gin up so much anger among already angry and largely misinformed Americans that the verdict in a single trial — if it hadn’t satisfied the bloodlust of thoroughly contemptible race-baiters like Maxine Waters — likely would have precipitated nationwide violence on an unprecedented scale.

Whose interests are served by calamity? Black Lives Matter — which doesn’t give a damn about the de facto black killing fields many Democrat-controlled cities have become — raked in $90 million last year, courtesy of its “woke” corporate enablers. BLM cofounder Patrisse Cullors insists the foundation is focused on a “need to reinvest into Black communities.” That the same Patrisse Cullors recently invested in a house in Los Angeles’s Topanga Canyon, where 88% of residents are white and just 1.8% are black?

Some revolutionaries are “more equal” than others.

Maxine Waters is equally abhorrent. The congresswoman who insisted Derek Chauvin is guilty of “first-degree murder” and urged rioters to “get more confrontational” is the one who requested an armed police escort to the anti-protest in Brooklyn Station. And if riots had occurred? Waters would have been far away, perhaps behind the barricades and barbed wire erected in Washington, DC, where equally feckless members of her party who have either countenanced or abetted the seven months of rioting last summer would also have remained if the almost inevitable results of their own race-baiting were realized.

Instead, Chauvin was convicted on all counts, while convicted felon and drug addict George Floyd was elevated to sainthood by Nancy Pelosi, and an equally reprehensible Joe Biden amplified how his empty promise was to unite the country by revisiting the lie that the nation is systemically racist.

Jaslyn Adams was a student at Cameron Elementary School. According to family members, she was nicknamed Pinky “because she was bright” and pink was her favorite color. “You just took away somebody’s queen. You just took away a mother’s daughter. You just put hurt on the father — for what?” asked community activist Andrew Holmes. “Every parent has taken a child to McDonald’s to get something to eat,” he added. “Not to get some bullets.”

Tragically, the bullets will continue flying, because demonized police will be reticent to enforce the law where most lawlessness occurs — and because there is simply no impetus to have a genuine conservation about race. That would require introspection among a black American community that has been convinced by progressives that all of its problems are externally generated. Thus, the glorification of thug culture, an out-of-wedlock birthrate approaching 70%, more than 50 years of a black-white education gap, and the reality that black Americans commit crimes at percentages far in excess of their representation in the general population will be wholly dismissed in terms of anything remotely resembling personal responsibility and/or bad life choices. Everything, no matter how dysfunctional or heinous, will continue being explained — and ultimately excused — by “systemic racism,” “white privilege/supremacy,” “gun violence,” and/or a “legacy of slavery.”

The family of Jaslyn Adams is dealing with the worst thing that can happen to any family. They won’t be the last, not as long as the status quo remains politically and financially useful for those with a vested interest in orchestrated division.

For such contemptible people, dead children like Jaslyn Adams, who don’t advance an agenda, are simply acceptable collateral damage.