In 2009, Rufus Seth Williams was elected to become District Attorney of Philadelphia, succeeding long-time prosecutor Lynne Abraham, a position he held from January 4, 2010 to July 24, 2017. Mr Williams was a decent prosecutor, but he wound up in legal trouble of his own, and spent 2½ years in federal prison.

Why do I begin with that? The answer is that, despite Mr Williams being a convicted felon and former drug addict, he has been turning his life around, and at least appears to be doing so successfully. Because he is doing that, and because he does not seem to minimize the personal failures he has had — Mr Williams states plainly in his Twitter biography that he was “Federally Incarcerated” — I can respect him.

On October 14, 2022, Mr Williams tweeted:

Tragically, yesterday 3 homicides were added to Philadelphia’s official year to date total. Sadly, we are now 0.7% off the all time record high. This should be unacceptable to everyone that truly values life. The violence, lack of accountability and lawlessness need not continue.

“This should be unacceptable to everyone that truly values life”? It has to be asked: how many people in heavily Democratic Philadelphia truly value life? In November of 2020, the good people gave 603,790 (81.44%) of their votes to the (purportedly) Catholic Joe Biden, who publicly supported, and still supports, an unlimited abortion license, to just 132,740 (17.90%) for Donald Trump, who at least claimed to oppose abortion, and appointed three pro-life Justices to the United States Supreme Court.

In 2016, the margin was even higher, percentagewise, as Philadelphians gave 584,025 (82.53%) of their votes to the odious Hillary Clinton, versus 108,748 (15.37%) to Mr Trump. Democrats outnumber Republicans in Philadelphia by huge margins, and the city’s last Republican mayor left office while Harry Truman was still President of the United States.

It is the stated position of the Democratic Party to always and everywhere support abortion, in every case, for any reason. The elected political leadership of the city support an unlimited abortion license, and The Philadelphia Inquirer wholly supports unlimited abortion.

So, I ask the question again, how many people in heavily Democratic Philadelphia truly value life? A Google search for abortion clinics in Philadelphia indicates that the city itself supports six abortion clinics, with two more nearby, in Bensalem, Pennsylvania and Cherry Hill New Jersey. While the political and media leadership of the city support abortion, it’s pretty clear that enough of the population do as well, if they can support that many abortuaries.

Is it any wonder, then, that a city which so heavily supports getting rid of inconvenient life when it comes to abortion would not be all that upset about other people getting rid of inconvenient life when it comes to the gang-bangers?

Because, let’s be brutally honest about this: getting rid of inconvenient life, whether we are talking about a pregnant woman who does not want to be ‘burdened’ with a baby, or a gang-banger or wannabe who does not want a member of a rival gang clique of young men^[1]We were reliably informed by The Philadelphia Inquirer that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes … Continue reading to burden his life are taking exactly the same decision, based on exactly the same reasons.

This lesson is not lost on the teenaged and twenty-something young men males of the City of Brotherly Love. They can see that ‘inconvenient’ life is cheap in Philly, cheap enough that the Philadelphia Police have a difficult time finding cooperating witnesses to solve homicides, and cheap enough that most people just don’t care! A wannabe gangsta gets offed in Strawberry Mansion? BFD, nobody other than his family cares, and a whole lot of people think that, hey, the neighborhood is better off with the victim no longer around. Even the very #woke^[2]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading Inquirer only seriously covers the victims of the city’s murders when the victim is an ‘innocent‘, someone already of some note, or a cute little white girl.

I have noticed that the (apparent) gang-land killing of 13-year-old Jeremiah Wilcox generated just one sympathetic story about the victim, and since then, the Inky has gone radio-silent; a site search for Jeremiah Wilcox, conducted at 10:18 AM EDT on Friday, October 14^th, four days after young Mr Wilcox was murdered, returned no new stories. I suspect, given that, and the apparently deliberately-targeted nature of his killing, Inquirer journolists^[3]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading have found nothing new that they want to publish.

It’s clear: life is just plain cheap in Philadelphia, and no one other than the immediate family and friends of a particular murder victim care about the victims. Because the Philadelphia media don’t cover the deaths of the not-so-innocent victims, all that those of us who do care, who do “truly value life,” are left with are the numbers, the statistics.

Abortion is like that. No one knows who was not born because his ‘mother,’ and some ‘doctors’ and ‘nurses’, saw to his unnamed death. Children killed by abortion are not names, just numbers, statistics often poorly kept.

And everybody who pays attention sees that, everybody who pays attention can tell that, to mangle the quote allegedly attributed to Josef Stalin, the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of 429 is a statistic.

My apologies to Mr Williams, but he has it entirely wrong: few people in the City of Brotherly Love actually do care about human life. That’s how they can support six abortion clinics, and that’s how they can choose not to help the police catch killers. In the end, there really is no difference.