From Big Shoulder to Big Shoulder.

The weather in Chicago has been beautiful for weeks; sunny and 70s with light breezes. The children are in their second month of school.

And recesses are being held indoors. And guardians are being stationed along the walking routes to the building. And heritage month festivals are being canceled. And students are asking themselves if they are going to be grabbed by armed, masked men, bound with zip-ties, and thrust into a van. They are unsure if their friends will disappear. They are unsure if their parents will disappear.

They do not know if they will go to sleep one night and wake up in darkness to the sound of strange, angry voices and steel-toed boots tromping through their kitchens, knocking photos off the walls and emptying their drawers without explaining why.

They cannot trust the air they breathe. A federal agent with more hate and fear than sense or decency was stuck in a grocery store parking lot and decided to open a canister of tear gas a block from their school.

They cannot trust the news they hear. They are told that their playgrounds are war zones and wastelands. They are told that their families are depraved and violent criminals. They are told that the purpose of this nightmare condition, of soldiers on the sidewalks and tanks in the streets, is to keep them safe and make the nation great again.

Chicago is a scarred and beautiful city, containing the multitudes of humanity down every alley and around every corner. There are stories unremembered and stories never forgotten underneath every layer of paint and recently poured asphalt. It is a patchwork of neighborhoods and the neighborhoods are patchworks of people, and every one of those people are valuable and important. They are each worth ten times as much as the thugs currently terrorizing them.

Chicago has done nothing to deserve the pestilence set forth upon it by our mad, rotting emperor and his lunatic court of cackling sycophants. Chicago has survived inferno and pollution and corruption and all manner of catastrophe both self-inflicted and externally wrought, and it will survive long after his name is torn from his skyscraper and consigned to the notoriety it has earned.

It should not be made to survive this. But it will.