REALITY IS SOCIALLY CONSERVATIVE.

I take two weeks off to tidy up the computer and around the house and events only become more fraught.  The American Conservative publishes a lament by a Chicago-area pastor, Rev. Corey Brooks.

On the south side of Chicago, where I pastor a church and lead a ministry, Project H.O.O.D., we are in the business of building dialogue as the way of rebuilding our community. We help build community leaders and we equip our neighbors—especially young black men who are exiting gangs—to build their own character and to help rebuild the streets. We build self-esteem and respect for our fellow man. And we build stronger families with firmer foundations.

The destructive violence, rioting, and looting of the last few days, however, have quickly erased years of our dialogue.

I recommend you read the whole thing. Here's the part of the argument I want to extend.

George Floyd’s death at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis sparked understandable outrage. How could another black man have died because of police brutality? The protests began as a natural outpouring of grief, as white and black Americans were united in their horror at this senseless act.

But these protests turned violent, and the victims of this widespread looting are often the black community leaders and business owners. How does it advance our cause of racial harmony to wreck the black communities?We are still surveying the damage on our streets. All of the CVS and Walgreens buildings were looted. The result is that we no longer have a pharmacy in our neighborhood. Church members are shuttling members of our community out to the suburbs to get their prescriptions and basic goods.

The grocery stores were also looted, leaving us without options to purchase local food.

The question lingers on many of our minds: Will these stores and pharmacies—so essential for daily living here—ever come back? It’s challenging enough in normal times to lure stores and businesses to rough neighborhoods; it’s going to be far more difficult to entice business owners to set up shop in our beleaguered communities now.

The Twelfth Street neighborhood in Detroit never recovered from the looting in 1967. The South Minneapolis neighborhood might suffer a similar fate.

Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass is also on the story.

Many in this African American neighborhood [Stony Island at 75th, southeast side] had worked desperately hard, for years, to bring full-service supermarkets to the food deserts of the South Side.

All they wanted was what the people who make their livings at home on laptops want:

A store with fresh meat, and baby formula that wasn’t out of date. A store with a pharmacy, and fresh vegetables, a safe place for the young and the old to shop. A store as symbol of better times ahead.

But now that it’s been looted, where will the mothers get the diapers and the baby food? Where will the seniors get medicine? An old woman who can no longer drive will just have to take a bus or two.

Read that column in full, and ponder: some of the people who cleaned out the store came back to give some of the diapers and formula away.  Also consider the fears of one resident.

A woman admonished the looters to stop. You could hear her voice from the parking lot, confronting the others. She was just a woman alone facing the mob.

She displayed more courage than any tough-talking politician with bodyguards, more courage than a columnist on a laptop.

“Stop!” she shouted at the looters. “We won’t have a grocery store! They’re not going to put it back in the community! We are not about this!”

Keep in mind, dear reader, that the woke thing among community activists, back before woke entered the lexicon, was keeping the big box stores out of the cities (and at the time, I was already of the view that the big cities were finished.)  Now, the mayors of those cities have a problem.

Why, exactly, would major retailers choose to rebuild and re-open stores that were burned to the ground or otherwise destroyed by rioters? What is there in the current response to riots by big city politicians that provides any assurance that the same thing won’t happen again? If you owned a store in an area that was destroyed by rioters, would you invest more money in the same location?

Particularly, notes John Hinderaker, where the business climate has been, shall we say, less than favorable.

What is a “food desert”? A food desert is an area where crime, shoplifting and, as here, looting and arson have made it unprofitable to operate a grocery store. There is no such thing as a food desert in a law-abiding neighborhood. Here’s a news flash: If you burn down the grocery stores near where you live, you might have a hard time buying groceries.

Riots are terribly destructive, but most of the damage does not occur overnight. It plays out over a period of years. Sadly, much of the progress that has been made by minority business owners and by minority neighborhoods in recent decades has been wiped away by rioters, looters and arsonists.

It didn't help any that Chicago's rookie mayor, Lori Lightfoot, decided that denouncing "vigilantes" was more important than, oh, securing the oases in what would become a food desert.

Two years ago, Target took some stick for pulling stores out of Chicago's south side neighborhoods.  Those were underperforming, according to business metrics, but not under attack by looters.  Today, though, the rookie mayor is not in a good place.  Here's a headline.  "Mayor Lightfoot Pleads With Walmart, Other Retailers To Not Abandon Chicago."  It continues,  "There were earlier reports that Walmart expected to rebuild all stores trashed by looters and vandals, but company officials later said they would open some stores and would not say which ones."  I don't know, if I've had to jump through all sorts of hoops and take all sorts of abuse just to open a store in a city, and then the residents trash it, well, I might be considering a more tactful way of telling the mayor what she told Our President.