I’ll Tell You How……..
“Who would do such a thing?” “How could something like this happen?”
These are the questions leading off most of the Chicago area television and radio news shows. They are being posed by the distraught family members of the dearly departed who were, at least at one time, resting in peace at the Burr Oak Cemetery in Chicago’s suburban town of Alsip.
Burr Oak Cemetery is a well known final destination for many of the black community in the Chicago area. Several high profile blacks are buried amongst the rolling hills and flowers of this well kept cemetery, including civil rights symbol Emmett Till, blues legend Dinah Washington and heavyweight boxing champion Ezzard Charles. But some who were laid to rest are no longer resting peacefully.
Four cemetery workers have been charged with digging up the graves and removing the decomposed bodies and bones of those buried there so they could resell the plots and pocket the cash. What started as a local investigation has now spread to the FBI who, at last count, figure the earthly remains of some 300 people were dug up and disposed of in a vacant lot behind the cemetery grounds.
Because this is a predominantly black cemetery the Reverend Jesse (No Tragedy Too Small To Get Some Face Time) Jackson was on site to hold a news conference, pulling grief stricken family members to the microphone to publicly air their pain. Jackson punctuated the anguish of the families by denouncing those involved and calling this piece of land “sacred ground”.
As the four people arrested for the crime are also black I fully expect Jackson to deflect the outrage currently directed at the actual perpetrators and redirected it toward the company owning this long established burying ground. Perpetua Holdings of Illinois, Inc. has owned the cemetery since 2001. It was they who became aware of the scam and notified police. Like many funeral related businesses Perpetua Holdings is an absentee owner, depending on their local managers and employees for the day to day operations. It was the manger and employees who were arrested.
30 to 40 FBI agents are currently sifting through debris and overgrown weeds in an adjoining vacant lot in an attempt to discern how many different sets of human remains were moved and identify them for reburial. It is estimated the perpetrators of this heinous act pocketed up to $300,000 in burial fees reusing these already occupied plots.
A well respected long time Chicago news anchor was on a local radio station discussing his personal opinion as to how this could happen. He said he felt this was an offshoot of the grand larceny and corruption involved in Illinois politics, from the Governor on down. While I find his theory intriguing, I must disagree.
The families ask “How could this happen” the answer seems plain to me. We live in a country and society where 800,000 to a million babies are aborted every year. These are living, growing human babies snuffed out by a hideously cruel procedure. We have a President who has voted on numerous occasions to allow nearly full term babies to be partially delivered only to have a tool jammed into their skull and their brains scrambled like an egg. Once a society is willing to accept the murder of these most precious lives there is no level too low to sink.
The group BlackGenocide.org estimates the death toll of black babies in this country at somewhere around 13 million since 1973. That is more than 4 times the death toll caused by AIDS, cancer, violence, accidents and heart disease combined. Their web site quotes the late civil rights leader Erma Clardy Craven when she said “Several years ago, when 17,000 aborted babies were found in a dumpster outside a pathology lab in Los Angeles, California, some 12,000 to 15,000 were observed to be black.”
This tragic incident is not a black thing, or a white thing. It’s a greed thing. But when human life ceases to hold value in a society, as is the case with abortion, it is not difficult to understand how cemetery workers can disgrace dead bodies in their graves.
