How’s everyone’s weekend going? Thanks for spending a portion of it with the Six.
Migrants flooding through our American boarders continues to dominate our news cycle. State and local politicians, exasperated by the problem but powerless to stop it, kick the can down the road. But the can can’t be kicked anymore. There’s no more vacant roads.
We are hearing a lot from idealists who want to define for us what America should be. But that America needs resources and money, and we’re tapped out. Our government has caused a problem it is incapable of solving. That’s progressivism.
If looking for an American immigrant story we should hold up as an American ideal come true, read up about a Chicagoan who passed away Thursday at the age of 80.
That’s Dick Butkus.
The youngest of seven children, Butkus’s parents were Lithuanian immigrants. His father, John, was a electrician. His mother, Emma, worked at a laundromat.
Butkus grew up in the Roseland neighborhood in Chicago’s South Side. He shared an 8x10 room with his four brothers. By the age of eight, he worked at a bakery, running errands. Butkus wrote in his autobiography how in lieu of money his compensation came in the form of “fresh bread and rolls.” He also explained how proud he was to bring food home for his family, “to carry those big warm bags home and put them on the kitchen table.”
As a teenager, Butkus graduated from carrying baked goods to moving furniture. He’d lift pianos and refrigerators up rickety flights of stairs in apartment houses.
His weight training regime included pushing a car up and down an empty Chicago street.
He bought a green 1949 Plymouth for $50. At football practices, his future wife, Helen, would sit in the car while parked next to the Chicago Vocational High School field located on 87th Street. Butkus met Helen at 14 and they remained together up until his death Thursday.
Butkus eventually went to the University of Illinois, got drafted into the NFL and became a Hall of Fame player and Chicago Bears legend.
Butkus, Payton, Ditka. All conversations about the Bears begin with those three names.
We mourn the passing of Butkus this week. But we celebrate his life, one that truly is an American-formed experience.
Maybe there is another Butkus amongst the thousands of migrants crossing our border each and every day. But their beginnings do not conjure up thoughts of “let freedom ring.” Politicians attempting to tell their stories spin tales of fiction, comparing busloads of Venezuelan illegals arriving in the middle of the night to that of early 20th century Europeans walking off ships at Ellis Island.
False romanticism.
What’s real is Dick Butkus, an American story grounded in the immigrant experience our country was founded upon centuries ago.
Rest in peace, #51.
Let’s proceed with the Six.
1. White House Reversal: Deportation Flights Resume.
We’ve seen a break in the ranks amongst the Dems as it pertains to the migrant crisis. Even bend-the-knee-and-lick-the-boot JB Pritzker admits the problem too overwhelming. The blowback from blue state leadership has the Biden Administration announcing it will waive 26 federal laws and allow for the construction of the Texas border wall Trump had begun. And as Politico reports, the White House will resume deportation flights. Over 200k Venezuelans are expected to be deported. Politics are the only game in town in Washington.
2. What $500 Means To Zinida Moore.
An experimental program paid $500 a month for a year—no strings attached—to 5,000 Chicagoans. Chicago magazine traces what the “Resilient” program’s extra cash did, and didn’t do, for Zinida Moore, a 41-year-old single mother of three who works two jobs. “It helped me knock out things I wanted to do and needed to do,” Moore says in the article. Her stack of bills is not as imposing, and her kids’ pile of new video games though has grown. “But nothing lasts forever, whether it’s a job, unemployment, or the Resilient program.” With three kids, the expenses will go on forever.
3. Michael Lewis: The Ultimate Insider.
A terrific deep dive and profile of Michael Lewis and his book on disgraced finance fraud Sam Bankman-Fried. Lewis wrote “The Big Short” and “The Blind Side” and has such a lauded reputation that Apple paid $5M for the TV rights to his new book without reading it. The collapse of FTX took him completely by surprise, Lewis says in the article and it’s reasonable to say he’s become too well-known to report accurately on his subjects. He "doesn’t write about people he can’t befriend" the writer of the piece maintains. Whether any of this is true or not is meaningless. Lewis’s books sell millions of copies and currency drives publishing.
The annual study of the American fast-food drive-thru experience is in, and Taco Bell has once again taken the title of fastest. According to this data-driven piece via QSR, TB clocks in at an average time of 279 seconds across a number of secret shoppers sent by the magazine. All told, drive-thrus are getting more efficient, as the average wait time across all studied brands was down 29 seconds compared to 2022. One company remains an outlier, though: Chick-fil-A, which has one of the longest average wait times in the entire data set—436 seconds, or over seven minutes—but one of the most efficient systems, given that the average number of cars in line hovers at 3.4 over the course of the analysis, more than 2.5 times the average of 1.3 cars in line across the set. Some cool graphics in this story and experiences we can all relate to: waiting in line at the drive thru for that quarter pounder or beef burrito.
Who can resist a baking whodunit? The author for Baffler hunts for what happened to the Guerilla Cookie, a tasty, dense granola treat that attracted a cult following in the Midwest during the 1970s but suddenly, alarmingly, disappeared around 1990. Who was the baker behind such a delight? A really fun, entertaining investigative treat of gooey goodness.
6. It’s Fat Bear Week: Best Movie Bear Attack Ever.
Voting has begun in the annual “Fat Bear” competition, a bracket-style contest where we choose the fattest, most rotund bear. In honor of the event, we at the Six link out the most famous Bear vs. Human scene in movie history. Survival helped this actor win the Oscar.
Thanks for reading everybody and have a great rest of your weekend.
Have a suggestion for The Sunday Six? Send email to jonjkerr@gmail.com.