A Little Slice Of South Africa Right Here In Indiana
Most of Indiana looks like you would expect, pretty flat with some rolling hills in the south, lots of corn, farms and small towns. Our largest city, Indianapolis, used to be known as the most livable large city in America. While that is slowly changing as our cities like Indy transform like most cities in America…
….changing demographically with Whites moving out to the suburbs, leaving the blacks in place and mestizos filling the void left by Whites, Indiana is still a deeply conservative, overwhelmingly White state (still over 75% as of 2020). That means relatively low crime, especially violent crime.
There has long been an exception to the sort of Indiana most people think of. Like a festering boil on the state, the northwest corner is the spillover zone from the blighted southern zone of Chicago. As you can see from this murder map of Chicago from Hey Jackass!, the areas around South Shore and South Chicago are shooting galleries and sit right on the border of Indiana.
On the other side of that border? The cities of Hammond and Gary, among others. This region of Indiana, just east of Chicago and along the Lake Michigan coast, was once home to a wide range of steel factories and other heavy industry but like much of the Rust Belt those jobs have largely left and what remains looks more like an especially crappy neighborhood in Detroit rather than the home of the Hickory High from the movie Hoosiers. I traveled to Gary once on business, probably around 1999 and it was one of the shittiest places I have ever been, and I’ve been to Haiti, Compton and Detroit.
Hammond is smaller than Gary but not much nicer. Gary was once the blackest city in America and even today is still around 80% black, while Hammond is “only” 25% black while the White population has dropped to 30%, and the mestizo population has exploded to over 40%. When you combine that with 80% black Gary to the east and Chicago to the west, Hammond is a rough town. So rough that they took some drastic action:
If you need gas during early morning hours in northwestern Indiana, don’t bother stopping in Hammond come November. A new law will force service stations to close between midnight and 5 a.m.
The city’s 37 gas stations must close during those hours under a new ordinance designed to curb crime.
The Hammond Common Council voted 7-2 Monday to approve the ordinance, which takes effect Nov. 1, news outlets reported.
Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. championed the ordinance.
“Right now, every time there’s an incident in the middle the night, we have to deploy multiple officers,” McDermott said. “I have 14 police officers working at 2 in the morning, and five or six of them will be tied up at a gas station.”
https://archive.vn/AU6zD
I wouldn’t recommend stopping in Hammond at any time of the day but definitely not in the middle of the night. When I had to travel to South Central L.A. on business I always scheduled the meetings for first thing in the morning before the Crips and Bloods woke up. Now, if you are heading to Chicago you had better fill up before you get to Hammond because after midnight….
They didn’t do this just to be assholes. How many videos have you seen of people getting shot, robbed, carjacked, assaulted, what have you, at gas stations? They attract criminals and malcontents. From the Northwest Indiana Times….
A variety of crimes, including homicides, robberies and a carjackings, have been committed at Hammond gas stations late at night and in the early morning hours. Since 2019, there have been 1,803 calls to police from Hammond gas stations open 24/7, (Hammond Mayor Thomas) McDermott told the audience.
https://archive.vn/KQDkx
In less than five years, there have been over 1,800 police calls to 24-7 gas stations or more than one per day. Hammond sits on I-94, a major freeway linking Detroit and Chicago, but it is just too dangerous to have gas stations open, although it does sound like the stations nearest the freeway exits can apply for an exemption.
Having services like gas stations and fast food joints along our highways, accessible every few miles, is one of the ways that America is a country made for long distance driving. I have said before that I could hop in my car right now and drive to almost anywhere in the country and be able to eat and get gas as often as I wanted to on the way except in some of the really remote places. Yet here is a city just outside of Chicago, one of the largest metro areas in the country, and you won’t be able to get gas from midnight to 5 AM?
If you have been to a third world shithole like Haiti, one of the things that jumps out at you is that everyone that can lives behind big concrete walls, and the people that can’t in those places end up being preyed upon without mercy by the thugs. After the earthquake in Haiti, people were forced to live in sprawling tent cities and women and young girls were raped constantly. The orphanage I stayed at while I was in Haiti was surrounded by concrete walls maybe 8-10 feet high at least, topped with razor wire and broken glass. The only entrance was an enormous steel gate that was shut and locked except when the bus went in or out. Every business seemed to have burly armed guards and nothing was open after dark. Now nothing is open period as the country has descended into utter madness.
That is where we are headed, with basic services we take for granted becoming unreliable or unavailable. Between out of control violent crime and the criminal syndicate running the country doing everything possible to make the infrastructure fail, America is going to more rapidly than ever start transforming into South Africa with the added fun of half a billion firearms in civilian hands. When you can’t get gas at night in a state like Indiana, you know things are getting bad.