Locals in a Roxbury neighborhood outside of Boston are protesting. Walgreens is closing a store there, and perhaps without knowing it, a customer interviewed by the Boston Globe explained why. It’s unsafe to walk to the next closest Walgreens, about a mile away.
It sounds like it might have been unsafe to walk to this one.
Walgreens issued a generic statement about why they closed, but everyone knows. Crime. Shoplifting. Employee and customer safety – also known as liability. It is or will cost them more money to stay, and unlike many they serve, they can leave.
Community members protesting the departure make excellent points.
“This Walgreens is critical, not just to this community but the surrounding communities and the seniors.” That’s Rev. Miniard Culpepper.
“The communities where they’re closing these pharmacies are communities where people are disparately impacted by disease — two or three times higher rates in cancer, diabetes, heart disease… Life expectancy can be 15, 20 years less.” That’s former Boston NAACP president Michael Curry.
“What happens to our seniors and our single parents that have nowhere to get to a Walgreens or another pharmacy anywhere near their home? And so we think it’s insensitive — it’s unjust,” he said. Culpepper, again.
I have no doubt there is injustice, but none of it has anything to do with Walgreens. They are not a charity nor one of those public-private chimeras. No taxpayer can or will be made to cover costs created by political decisions by minorities and those they elected. So, yes, elections matter, and this is one of those things that comes as a result. You can even blame white people, but that won’t fix what ails you. It won’t fix itself, and even God – and the Reverend will understand this – took a week to create the world and everything he wanted on it.
You have, for too long, not voted in your best long-term interest, and it’s not just your community or minorities, we see it all across the increasingly fruitless plain. Politicians of all sexes, races, colors, and creeds, almost all of them Democrats (that’s not a coincidence), sell you lies. They use emotion, blame, and the promise of fast fixes at other people’s expense that are little more than vote-getting confidence scams.
Your Walgreens is closing because your elected officials can’t or won’t prevent or police crime, but you knew that. Few know more about crime than urban-dwelling minorities. Lucille Culpepper-Jones can’t walk to the next Walgreens because it’s not safe, so the question should not be why it is unjust for Walgreens to leave her without any other option. The question is, how did it get to be that way?
White evangelical Trump supporters in Iowa didn’t do it. The history proves that they helped improve minority lives a good deal when they elected Donald Trump in 2016. Before he left office, minority employment and wages were at historic highs. But even then, the community still voted for Democrats up and down the ticket. Sure, they marched with you in honor of a dead career criminal and the multi-million dollar con that was BLM. They consoled you when rioters they called mostly peaceful protesters, looted and burned black businesses in your communities—assaulted or ended black lives. They promised reparations. Justice.
BLM’s leaders got rich and moved into white neighborhoods. Your politicians dressed up their progressive resumes for each other. And you got more crime, less opportunity, and less access than you had before any of that.
The problem is ideologically systemic, and unless you are wholly owned by the narrative, looks deliberate.
In Chicago, the city announced it would replace departing grocery stores that, like Walgreens, are “unable to protect their employees or customers or make a profit where “petty” theft is not prosecuted” – with its own. City-run stores. My first question was, will they prosecute shoplifters then? Would stealing bread and milk be considered an insurrection, or is that only when they are Trump supporters – of which there are a growing number among minorities for good reason.
The better questions are why government-run anything like this is necessary and what these communities should expect given how those same people have treated them in the past. Look around you. With a few exceptions, folks trapped in these communities are not much more than the products on an otherwise empty Demorat-run store shelf. You vote for them, and they promise you justice, which, translated, means a crime-riddled subsistence living the next generation can only improve by becoming criminals themselves.
You can fix it, but you have to own it first and then do something different for a lot of years, and that’s a lot harder than blaming Walgreens.
