Will Lori Lightfoot crack down on Chicago gangs?

It will be interesting to see if Mayor–elect Lori Lightfoot breaks the code of silence surrounding the role gangs play in the violence impacting our city.

Lightfoot has vowed to make Chicago’s streets safe for all of its citizens.

Past efforts to make our neighborhoods safe involved the use of technology, additional police and reducing the number of guns on the streets. These efforts have had little effect on the gangs that are so brazen, so callous and lost, that they will snuff out a precious life without a second thought.

In discussions about the violence, gangs are seldom, if ever mentioned by the media, law enforcement, the clergy and local politicians. It is as though gangs do not exist. They go about their deadly deeds with seeming impunity.

This killing will continue until gangs are removed from our streets.

Ned L. McCray, Tinley Park

Vets thankful for free city stickers

As a veteran of the Vietnam era, current commander of the American Legion Portage Park Post 183 on the Northwest Side, and an accredited service officer for veterans filing claims with the Veteran’s Administration, I wish to personally thank City Clerk Anna M. Valencia for her recent regulation change.

Prior to this change, only former POW’s, and those who received a Purple Heart or were service-connected disabled, could get a no-fee city sticker. Valencia has now opened it up to all veterans.

On behalf of the veterans of my post, and all those veterans living in the Chicago, thanks for recognizing our service to our country.

Raymond, P. Toczek, Chicago

Obama Presidential Center is not a natural evolution for Jackson Park

It is our scruffy patch of wilderness.

Jackson Park is a reprieve from urban cacophony and density.

Five a.m. walks were so still, often misty and sometimes golden as the sunrise erupted over the lake.

It never got old.

It is possible to walk straight through the center, across the back of the field house and all the way to 67th Street without barriers.

When the Supreme Court dismissed a conservation group’s suit against a conversion of eight acres of wilderness, Justice William O. Douglas wrote in dissent:

“The voice of the inanimate object … should not be stilled … before these priceless bits of Americana … are forever lost or are so transformed as to be reduced to the eventual rubble of our urban environment; the voice of the existing beneficiaries of these environmental wonders should be heard.”

The above quote applies anytime and anywhere Lois Wille’s book “Forever Open, Clear and Free” is threatened by the commercial.

The 80-acre Walt Disney Recreation Complex was no more a natural evolvement of the Sequoia National Park than the 26-acre Obama Presidential Center is a natural evolvement of Jackson Park.

Part of the Obama presidential legacy is the generous enhancement of land for more than one national park out West.

The OPC Foundation has the same opportunity here. Find another parcel wanting development and increase park land.

Kathie Newhouse, Chicago