“Safe passage” routes in Chicago working about as well as expected

The latest from that toddlin’ teeterin’ town.

The eyes of the city were on Chicago Public Schools “Safe Passage” routes Monday morning as a 28-year-old man was shot along one of the routes and a 14-year-old boy was shot to death near another one, the day before school starts.

The 14-year-old boy was shot and killed within a block of a welcoming elementary school, Melody Stem School, 3937 W. Wilcox. It’s at least the third fatal shooting along or near a Safe Passage route since mid-August.

What’s next, letters of transit?

The attitude demonstrated by some of the parents of school-age children is astonishing:

“I don’t really feel too threatened,” said Vicki Brown, 29, a parent with two kids at Melody. “It’s a relative thing. You can’t control the violence.”

Kaylyn Williams, the children’s father, agreed.

“I feel the kids are relatively safe,” he said, as sirens wailed in the distance.

Nope, you can’t control the violence. It’s just a force of nature or an act of God, like the city’s corrupt Democratic machine, and the self-replicating failure of the welfare system and its fueling of social pathologies, and the consequent destruction of family values, and the endless series of feckless mayors whose unwavering adherence to gun-control laws has placed whatever’s left of Chicago’s law-abiding community at permanent risk of injury and death at the hands of gangs that completely ignore such laws. No human agency involved at all, just one of those things.

What a cultural and political sink hole. But, unfortunately, only one of many.