Prologue - I reject the Gulag’s correctional supervision.
Solzhenitsyn, a prisoner of the Soviet Union’s forced labor camps once said, “Overall, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America - more than six million – than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.”
But, just as the “Gulag” of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union, Chicago maintains its own Gulag system that punishes a free press, free speech, and free thought.
I was born behind Chicago’s Iron Curtain and, for many years, accepted this repressive system of “correctional supervision” as the norm. But, as their “facts” were inevitably exposed as lies, this normalcy faded away and my prison bars were revealed.
In my South Side neighborhood of Beverly, it was easy to believe the normalcy was real. It is a place where pleasant old ladies still tend to their immaculate tree-lined front yards and kids ride their squeaky bikes to Rainbow Cone in the summer. Where families, with surnames like Hynes, Joyce, Keane and, yes, Daley, still mark the area as their political “turf” and capacity crowds fill the pews at St. Barnabas and Christ the King parishes on Sundays. We were the unknowing cogs in the wheel of Chicago’s well-oiled socialist political machine.
This Irish Catholic edge of the 1st Congressional District is represented by former Black Panther Defense Minister Rep. Bobby Rush. The Hawaiian-transplant, then State Senator Barack Obama, ran and lost his first race for Congress here in 2000. Salty newspaper reporters, Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonists, and my neighbor, Nation of Islam leader, Minister Louis Farrakhan, have lived here too.
The street corners of my youth were filled with ACORN activists peddling socialism, Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Operation Push pushing racism for cash and hate-filled preachers like Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
I could ignore all of this – but I couldn’t ignore the truth: I needed to be free of the “correctional supervision” of the Gulag Chicago.