Lonsberry: Rochester Is A Sanctuary City

                                                                                                                           

Rochester is a sanctuary city.

Except for its residents.

On the day people talked about Mayor Lovely Warren's open-arms embrace of illegal aliens, seven people were shot, two were stabbed and two were purposefully run down by an automobile.

On the same day, Chicago had just two shootings.

So, if you're an illegal alien, you can come to Rochester. But why would you want to? Why would you want to, as a border crasher or a legal refugee, throw your future into the blender of what is arguably America's poorest, most-dangerous and least-educated city?

You don't seek sanctuary in Rochester, you seek sanctuary from Rochester.

This is the sort of place illegal aliens and refugees are trying to get away from.

And yet the fiddle Lovely Warren plays as her Rome burns is the current progressive cause of "sanctuary." Apparently, she sees her first obligation as being the interests of people on foreign shores.

While the bodies drop on hometown streets.

On Genesee Street last night, just blocks from where a deadly drive-by on the Boys and Girls Club horrified the city summer before last, shots rang out and four men went down. That in a neighborhood which has given Lovely Warren and her political patron decades of political power and personal privilege, a neighborhood where the schools suck, the jobs don't exist, the hypodermic needles accumulate and the crime is a constant threat.

Having failed to do her job, she is intent on doing what is not her job.

Having failed the people of Rochester, she and her party pretend to help the disadvantaged of the world.

It is nothing more than a distraction and a disservice, a forgetting of the truth that charity begins at home. The mayor who offers sanctuary to the television cameras is the same mayor who bulldozed a homeless camp of her own residents, and had the paltry belongings of its residents thrown into a Dumpster.

There are ever more ribbon cuttings at taxpayer-subsidized downtown gentrifications -- condos and apartments for the top 5% -- but the city's most-used technology seems to reliably be Shot Spotter. 

Mayor Lovely Warren often speaks of coming out of the neighborhoods, but she doesn't often talk about looking back and doing them any good. Black voters put her in office -- and therefore can be said to have political power -- but they don't have any benefit from it. The neighborhoods where Rochester's black residents live are almost uniformly plagued by social decay that Lovely Warren's political machine regularly mines for its own benefit. Her patron, Assemblyman David Gantt, has spent a generation ruling over some of the most dysfunctional and miserable pockets of the American population.

And over that whole generation, nothing has gotten better.

David Gantt has gotten richer -- he now collects a full salary and a full pension for his "public service" -- but the lives of his constituents have gotten no better. 

The schools continue to fester, the gunshot victims get younger and younger, and the jobs are ever harder to find.

The political structure of Rochester does not fix problems, it profits from them. It perpetuates them. It builds its kingdom upon them. 

While the people suffer.

While young black boys have a less than 10% percent likelihood of graduating from high school. While their moms and dads fear for their safety as they approach their teen years. While elderly people face real risk as they walk down the street or sit in their homes. While poverty rates grow and futures dim.

That's the reality of Rochester, at least in its most-challenged neighborhoods.

And the mayor is talking about sanctuary.

A sanctuary her own suffering constituents know nothing about.


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