Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll has a thought: JUST SAY NO TO TAXPAYER FINANCED GROCERY STORES FOR NEIGHBORHOODS THAT DROVE OUT THEIR CORPORATE GROCERY STORES! She writes:

It is fitting that this column will run on a Friday the 13th because the very idea of it is not only surreal, but kind of terrifying.

Oh, before we begin, I have a new definition of “surreal”: I actually saw that some of the hefty harridans on The View were chortling because one of the talking points delivered to them on that day was that, in addition to his 35,403 other crimes, allegedly Donald J. Trump had – are you sitting down? – LIED ABOUT HIS WEIGHT!

And yelling pointlessly at my computer I suggested that somebody should collect all of their Drivers’ Licenses from their purses and wallets and then bring out some scale used for livestock and make every one of those horrible women weigh in. Then check their licenses. If the numbers are not in synch, they have “lied about their weight” and will be summarily fired. Not for being fat, which, thank God is not a crime – but for being hypocrites.

Ah, a girl can dream…but let us now return to our regularly scheduled column. Which is about Mayor Brandon Johnson, defender of thieves, lover of looters, and his modest proposal for what to do about grocery stores leaving Chicago.

We have all heard the “Lizzie Borden Defense” – that she killed her parents and then threw herself on the mercy of the Court because she was an orphan. That was thought humorous when I was a kid, though never prophetic. Well, hold Lizzie’s beer!

Because the fact is that thieves, looters, and professional shoplifters have invaded grocery stores in certain neighborhoods, emptying shelves day after day after day after day. And that has made the owners of those stores reluctant to stay in the neighborhood! Nobody could have predicted THAT outcome, could he? And take a wild guess who the Bad Guys are in that scenario, according to Brain-Dead Brandon.

If you guessed “the looters and thieves,” you would be wrong. No, no, no, racist. It’s the greedy grasping grocers who are supposed just to sit there and take it when their inventories are cleared out without recompense. In much the same way that white people at mandatory Maoist Diversity Training and Racial Abuse Sessions are supposed just to sit there and take it and not walk out or talk back lest they be without employment forthwith. I wouldn’t last five minutes. Which is one reason why for 30 years I was self-employed.

Nope, those grocers should not have the right to pack up and get out. Because, without those stores, the residents of the neighborhoods that put them out of business will be forced to live in a – say it with me now — “food desert”. Awww…Karma’s a mean mama sometimes, eh?

Here is what Mr. Johnson’s take is, “take” being the operative verb in his worldview: “All Chicagoans DESERVE to live near convenient, affordable, healthy grocery options.”

You don’t say? And exactly what document can you produce, Mr. Johnson, that guarantees that? Because I may have missed out on benefits that I DESERVED, Heaven forfend.

Now, frankly, I prefer “food desserts,” but apparently I was in a “food desert” long before I moved to Arizona, an actual desert! Even long before Obama said that a neighborhood without arugula was a food desert. I thought “arugula” was some sort of social disease, and have had no reason to alter my opinion after tasting the “vile weed” (hat-tip: Newman on Seinfeld, although he was discussing broccoli).

In my St. Paul suburb (Maplewood), I lived 12 miles from Byerly’s, my grocery store of preference. TWELVE MILES!! That’s further than from my little hometown of Alexandria, Minnesota to ANOTHER little town called Osakis, which is 10 miles away!

We lived about 8 miles from my second choice, the Kowalski’s in either White Bear Lake or St. Paul. We lived just over two miles from Cub in St. Paul, which I considered the sand in the food desert. I did not work most days of my life from the age of 14 to bag my own groceries, thank you very much.

If we needed a loaf of bread in a blizzard, we MIGHT go to Cub. But, we had no close “neighborhood” grocery store like the pro-crime mayor of Chicago is whining about. And not because we had shoplifted it out of existence. We just lived in a spread-out place called a “suburb.”

See, the shoplifting in these “food deserty” neighborhoods was not a few kids taking candy bars or even the laughable notion that people were, like the starvelings in Les Miz, just taking some milk and bread for their babies. No. This was organized crime. Evidently when Walmart left, there had been 15,806 thefts that they KNEW about! Seven percent of the thieves had been arrested – what percentage had been convicted and punished was not for us to know.

At least in Los Angeles, we learned that professional thieves were stealing boatloads of merchandise from every retail outlet – up to $950 worth at a pop, the California limit for legal theft — to exchange for money or drugs. Nobody was stealing because he was “hungry” as even a cursory glance at the mountainous miscreants would make clear.

While we can work up some sympathy for the handicapped elderly person who cannot now get to a nearby store, we return to the Lizzie Borden paradigm. Let’s say just 5 percent actually shoplifted and looted. It’s probably much higher, but I’ll start with that.

But I bet – no polls, no evidence, just human nature observed – that maybe another 20-30 percent were willing to buy at steep discount stolen steaks and liquor out of a van. Then that leaves the others who, almost to a person, voted to “defund the cops,” who embraced the false notion that we have an “overincarceration of criminals of color,” “no bail,” and the whole rest of the crime-lovers’ package.

It turns out that in life, it is shocking to learn just how FEW things anybody actually “deserves” that he, she, or xe did not earn with hard work.

Want to hear the hilarious “solution” that some of Mr. Johnson’s co-thinkers have for what should happen when the grocers leave? If you said “Crack down on crime. Station cops in every store and ARREST and IMPRISON thieves,” again you are wrong. You don’t seem to be grasping the concept of “DESERVE.”

No, instead of “five-finger discount” – or in most cases “the Armload or Wheelbarrow Discount” — EVERYTHING should be free and paid for out of the taxpayers’ stash.

One moral idiot defined the new concept as “similar to a regular grocery store except it would be more like a library or Post Office.” I must have failed to get the memo that stamps were now free in the Post Office. My neighbor the Paranoid Texan is always scolding me for not reading my HOA missives.

But let’s examine the notion of the stores being like a library. So people are just planning to borrow food for a couple of weeks and then return it? If not, then it’s not really LIKE a library at all, is it? I doubt the person suggesting this has ever BEEN to a library. Or read a book. Certainly not one on economics.

No. Just no.