My daily commute from Waukesha to work in Milwaukee is 45 minutes to an hour each day one-way in rush-hour traffic. Every so often I give up on the freeway and take Capitol Drive or Bluemound Road home. You can now count me as one scared little suburbanite unwilling to stop anywhere on Milwaukee's North Side.
I have a wife and kids at home. Quite frankly, it's not worth it to them or to me to get shot for my car, or my Dallas Cowboy jacket, just because I stop for food or gasoline. Whatever it is, it will just have to wait until I get home.
If you think I'm an aberration, I'm not. Mention the mob beating, or the recent shooting at 92nd and Capitol, or the daily toll of death on the streets of Milwaukee, you'll often get a response of rather dark humor, resignation, or just general disgust. A few people might say they won't change their habits with the increase in violence, but when they're in their car and driving home at night their risk assessment changes.
Eventually, some businesses will die off. More people will flee to the suburbs. Milwaukee's mayor, whether it's Barrett or a successor, will get to preside over a city out of control. If they try to restore order using the police, they'll just be called racists (or Uncle Toms, depending on the politician's skin color). Michael McGee will eventually win and the Milwaukee Public Schools will be an even worse Hell filled with punks wearing "no snitching" t-shirts the kids won't be able to read.
It will be a liberal paradise, because the official policy of the city will be to fear the policeman with a gun more than the criminal with gun. (It's already official policy to fear the law abiding citizen with a gun more than the criminal.) Soon the police will be little more than parking enforcers and tavern ordnance enforcers, shaking down the law abiding for more cash for a dying city's coffers.
Eventually my job will move out to the suburbs, as well as all the jobs my company generates. Milwaukee will be left as a burned-out shell of a city, murdered in cold blood. But the blue bracelets they handed out to stop the violence will be a nice find in the junk heaps.
When my children are older I'll tell them what it was like to grow up in Milwaukee, even as my parents tell me about their first apartment on Atkinson. My children will think I was lucky to escape alive. Perhaps I was.
