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I was briefly (for about 15 minutes) caught up in the Sixties euphoria, as a tidal wave of utopian meddling by social justice lawyers washed over the nation's courts. At that time I was enamored and way too-eager to please a leftie psychologist (I'll call her Susie) whose amibtion in life was to empty the city's asylums and mental wards onto Chicago's streets. Susie's (and others') intention in that New Age of Enlightenment was, first, to liberate the mass of psychos, sociopaths and other mental sickos from from their "unjust" institutional confinement (and treatment) and then to merge that mass of sick humanity with the city's ubiquitous street gangs, at that time most dangerously its Blackstone Rangers, a massive criminal enterprise among inner city blacks hiding behind the DemocRat Party's delusion that they were not violent thugs but underprivileged victims of systemic racism, especially racial prejudice by law enforcement against POC's in Chicago. (Fifty years of such DemocRat Party political derangement led to the Summer of Love.)

Fast forward: At Susie's urging, I set up a volunteer legal aid clinic at one of Chicago's mental hospitals, with pro bono publicum office hours one night a week from 6-9 PM, advising patients and representing them in the exercise of their right to be crazy on city streets. My last two patients were 1) a man arrested and hospitalized after murdering his wife in her bed, fleeing his house with 4 small children, and driving aimlessly around his neighborhood in a snow storm until his car ran out of gas, and 2) a man fixated on Sun Times columnist Ann Landers, who was arrested for threatening Anne Landers and declared mentally unfit to stand trial. I interviewed the wife-killer and the guy fixated on Ann Landers, conferred with their psychiatrists and the police, came to the conclusion that they were both dangerously crazy, and decided that Chicago was safer and they were much better off by accepting the medical status quo, indefinite commitment to and treatment in the City's mental ward. Then, I closed my mental health legal aid clinic, moved away from Chicago, and watched for the next 25 years as smug, self righteous legal aid and ACLU lawyers emptied the nation's hospital beds of mentally ill patients. School shooters were just around the corner.

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It's the insanity (pun intended) against reason that I can't understand.

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Ideology answers reason's cry and overloads the rational brain with righteous feelings.

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Glad you got out, Paladin. I left Chicago in July 1966 during the nation-wide airline strike. Rode a Greyhound bus to New Orleans and then to my first ship in Rhode Island. Never been back to the People's Democratic Republic of Illinois except for the minute it takes to skirt through Hwy 51 & 62 south of Cairo.

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You left Shacawga when I arrived for law school.

Duh Mare in the Sixties knew how to collect the garbage, clean the streets, control the criminals, run a corrupt city and make money for the Party at the same time.

Dem's today (including Chicago Dem's) can't do any of that.

Making everything about race ruined everything, including race!

Loved Richard J's bold public statements, especially his unapologetic "in your face" attitude and his charming malapropisms:

He came under his heaviest attack during and after the 1968 Democrat Convention riots. I was in law school in Chicago and recall Daley at his best then. "What trees do they plant?" he said of the Commie rioters in Grant Park as he planted a tree and announced a new "tree planting" project for Chicago. Brilliant!

At one news conference when the media jackals got on his beleagured ass, Da Mare said of the press, "They have villified me; they have slandered me; they have attacked me; they have crucified me. They have even criticized me." Precious! So damn colorful.

At another press briefing, Daley was criticized for giving City business to one of his sons. Daley went deftly on offense and asked what kind of people were these reporters who refused to acknowledge that a father should help his family.

The in doors TV coverage of the 1968 Convention showed an angry Mayor Daley (arguably, after LBJ, the most powerful politician in America) in the audience jeering commie Senator Abe Ribicoff as he berated "Chicago's Finest" (remember when we applauded cops?) from the podium. The nation was eye witness to the spectacle of the DemocRat Party, live on national live television, breaking apart along class and status lines. That hard fought division in 1968 was the last gasp of the old Democrat Party. The lefties won control of the Party, put Nixon and Reagan in the White House twice, elected Donald Trump, and brought on the Frankenstein monsters, Obama and Biden.

As William Bendix would have said on the black and white TV days of The Life of Riley, "What a revoltin' development this is!"

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The 1968 Democrat National Convention was great. Mike Wallace got detained by the police during the nomination, John Chancellor was humiliated by Mayor Daley and Dan Rather got gut punched on the convention floor. Lots of hippies got wood shampoos from the Chicago PD. When I was 6 I had a crush on "Babs" Riley. She was 19. It never worked out.

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Good recall!

By 1968 the DemocRat Party was in a full scale retreat running away from from the Cultural Marxists. Couldn't think of three better targets for the dying forces of law, decency and order to harrass than Wallace, Rather and Chancellor (although he, at least, was not morally repugnant.) Rather than Chancellor, I would nominate "Walter the Pompous, Overrated, Hollow Man Cronkite."

Dem's organized a national commission (Kerner Commission) on racism to adopt the Dem's already-arrived-at lie, their politically self-serving (prophetically self-fulfilling) assertion that we'd become two societies, black underprivileged and racist white privileged. The Kerner (who would later go to prison) Commission spun off a select subcommittee, the "Walker (who would also go to prison) Commission," to blame Chicago's police for the '68 Chicago Convention riots. As a law student, I worked as an "investigator" on that Soviet-style study. Joke!

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Walter Vissarionovich Cronkite. The repellent TV hack who declared the Vietnam War unwinnable after Tet in 1968, even though it was a crushing defeat for the NVA and VC. Meh. Vietnam was always going to go their own way after they kicked out the French. We should have stayed home. What did we learn?

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What did we learn?

We were allowed to learn what Walter and the boys wanted us to learn: 1) that US was/is bad; 2) that the US military was/is morally corrupt, from the buffoons at the top to the war criminals at the bottom; and 3) that the Republicans who end wars (Eisenhower, Nixon and Trump) are war criminals, while the DemocRats who lie to start wars and lie to wage wars ( Gulf of Tonkin, LBJ and, yes, Dem darling JFK) are freedom fighters. What "Walter and the Boys" and their media heirs kept/keep from us is that the Vietnam War with Creighton Abrams was at last being properly fought by us and was being won, that the Tet Offensive was a military calamity for Red Russia and Red China, that the media-run cowards of the DemocRat Party in Congress snatched political defeat in Washington DC from the jaws of American victory on the field, turned tail and ran away, destroyed the nation of South Vietnam, abandoned/ murdered/ imprisoned hundreds of thousands of America's Vietnamese allies, and caused America's only defeat in the Cold War. Forever Wars harm America because they're run for defeat by anti-American Forever War politicians (like LBJ and the Bushes,) weaken America, impoverish Americans, kill off the middle class, and empower the media, all of which are the anti-American raison d'etre of the media and its political arm, the DemocRat Party.

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I am old enough to remember the Happy Valley style funny farms. They were a common as the TB asylums of the 30s. Crazy people (not a pejorative back then) got help there when they needed it, either voluntarily or not. It was only when the do-gooder's in the 60s liberated them from compulsory treatment, often involving institutionalization, that the problem of homelessness, feces bespattered sidewalks and the Walking Dead became a problem. We gave them their freedom to reach their fullest potential and, by God, they did. The only upside is that the do gooders have to dodge the poop on the sidewalks and avoid ax attacks like the rest of us.

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Unfortunately I see that humanity doesn't scale well and cannot self regulate beyond the village... But looking forward positively, when some of us survive this event, we might have another opportunity to reflect on village life whilst working together in one.😁🐑🦆🐔🌌🌄

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And a bit more on topic- which group is the current minority?

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