My wife and I are both natives of the Toledo, Ohio region. I grew up in a suburb on the west side, she in a suburb on the east side. Much of our family and our roots are in that city so we try to keep up on the news from the Toledo area. This morning I saw a story that caught my eye:
Toledo police officer shot and killed in west Toledo; Suspect found dead
Officer Anthony Dia was responding to a call about a drunk guy wandering around the Home Depot parking lot holding a beer. He arrived on the scene and as the guy was walking away from him, he suddenly turned around and shot Dia in the chest, killing him. The shooter apparently ran off to a wooded area and shot himself.
A terrible story and a reminder that law enforcement is at risk every single time they interact with the public. This guy probably showed no signs of being anything other than a drunk but he killed a cop in the blink of an eye. I doubt Dia even had time to reach for his weapon. I didn’t especially care what Officer Dia’s background was, he was a cop killed in the line of duty.
But Toledo Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz didn’t miss this opportunity to do a little virtue signaling while lamenting the death of Officer Dia.
The mayor spoke about Officer Dia’s death coming on July 4, a day to reflect on the nation’s sacrifices. He said Officer Dia was also Muslim and contributed other perspectives to the department.
“He was not only therefore one of Toledo’s bravest and best police officers, he’s also someone who contributes to the diversity that makes our country and our city so great,” Mr. Kapszukiewicz said.
The man has only been dead for a few hours and here is the Mayor of Toledo doing some campaigning.
Most Americans don’t care whether a cop is White or black or mestizo, Christian or Muslim or atheist. They just want them to protect and serve and to honor them for doing so. If Officer Dia was a White Roman Catholic, the faith of so many Toledo natives who built Toledo, would his religious upbringing have been mentioned by Mayor Kapszukiewicz , himself a Roman Catholic?
The idea that Muslims are a significant part of what makes America and Toledo great is laughable. For most of American history, people who were a faith other than Christian, Protestant or Catholic, cultural or devout, were a very small minority. Muslims are a small subset of that minority. Even today after 50 years of mass migration and an influx of “refugees”, Muslims are only around 1% of the American population, and that percentage was certainly much lower in the past. Until around 1950, the adherents to non-Christian faiths other than Judaism was so small as to not even register.
For all of American history until very recently, Whites were an overwhelming super-majority. White people formed this nation, conquered the vast North American continent, built our cities, cleared our rich agricultural lands for farming, built bridges and tunnels and constructed the infrastructure that connects this massive nation from coast to coast, discovered scientific breakthroughs that have improved the lives of all people. White people wrote our great literature and music, built zoos and libraries and museums, created universities that were the envy of the world. Their sons fought in two World Wars and kept the peace at home.
Certainly non-White people have made significant contributions to America but those contributions pale in comparison to the achievements of the British colonists, European immigrants and their descendants. America was great, arguably at our greatest, in the years leading up the 1965 immigration changes that opened the floodgates for non-European immigration.
Toledo used to be a pretty prosperous, nice city. In 1970, right before I was born at Toledo Hospital, the city was around 85% White but that percentage has plummeted, as has been the case for most urban areas. As White people moved to the Toledo suburbs like Sylvania, my hometown of Waterville and my wife’s hometown of Oregon, Toledo has declined. Like many cities, what once were nice neighborhoods of single family homes have been degraded and become dangerous. Crime has increased and many areas aren’t safe to walk around. Already this year Toledo has 24 murders in the first six months of the year, the highest on record for at least a decade. 20 of the 24 murder victims were black and it is safe to assume that the killers were also black.
Is Toledo a better place to live and do business now than it was when it was less “diverse”? Of course not. No one believes that it is. It is just one of those things that public figures and corporations are required to say, part of the secular liturgy of neo-Marxism. Anyone can look at pictures of the downtown areas of cities like Detroit and Baltimore and Toledo from the 1950s and then look at them today and see the rot that has occurred as they become more diverse.
Wade Kapszukiewicz knows this. Everyone who lives in the Toledo area knows this. Mayor Kapszukiewicz is about my age and grew up just a short drive from where I grew up. He knows what Toledo used to be like and what it is today. But as a Democratic politician in a city that is increasingly diverse, he feels like he has to take every opportunity to mutter the false phrases demanded by the non-White voters of Toledo.
The people of Toledo and the family of Officer Dia should be allowed to mourn his death in the line of duty as a noble sacrifice of the kind made by so many cops over the years. It certainly shouldn’t be hijacked by the Mayor of Toledo for his own poltical gains.
"My wife and I are both natives of the Toledo, Ohio region. I grew up in a suburb on the west side, she in a suburb on the east side. Much of our family and our roots are in that city so we try to keep up on the news from the Toledo area."
My wife and I were both born and raised in Indianapolis. Same story here, except that I don't have to keep up with the news from there to know what the general content is. Sure isn't the same city as the one where I, as a 12-year-old, could safely get on a city bus on a Saturday morning, by myself, and go downtown, there to get off the bus at Monument Circle and walk eight blocks north to the big central library, spend most of the day, and go home the same way.
"Diversity" is, indeed, our weakness. And apparently a fatal one.
Even as a kid and teen in the 80s, our local mall (Southwyck) had one night that was known as "black night", or other more colorful terms, when the local White kids stayed clear. Eventually the ability of the inner city Toledo diversity to hop on a city bus to get to the mall, making it unsafe for decent people to shop or see movies, led to the closure of the mall.