We Can't Speak to Each Other in Chicago. This Is Why People Keep Dying.
Here's the thing: not much comes next.
Last Friday, the Chicago Police Department announced its officers conducted 140 arrests, in addition to confiscating weapons and tens of thousands of dollars worth of drugs in a coordinated effort. According to an announcement from the South Side Police Headquarters, it was one of the most significant gang raids in the city's history.
Of course, the Chicago Police Department can't be everywhere at any given moment, and citizens shouldn't expect that level of coverage to stem the tide of rising violence. Instead, the city must examine, question, and work toward eliminating the consistent and systemic issues that have bred an ecosystem of bloodshed.
Two weekends ago, a 13-year-old girl shouted, "I killed her. I killed her," after fatally stabbing 15-year-old De'Kayla Dansberry at the city's Johnson College Prep. According to reports, Tamika Gayden, the 13-year-old's mother, provided the knife. A large fight between teenagers on an early Saturday night spiraled into the loss of a life. Whatever the fuel for the anger, a child's life (two children, in reality) should not have been up for debate.
Dansberry's murder was the 244th in the city, and thus far, more than 1,300 people have been shot, the highest rate in decades. On January 18, a 34-year-old man was shot stemming from an argument that began on a CTA bus. On March 25, a man was killed and another man was injured after getting into an argument with another man at a sports bar.On April 14, a 19-year-old man was shot on the sidewalk after getting into an argument with another man. They all sound so similar, but they were all individuals with individual lives, individual families.
We forget that part as the numbers go up.
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Cyclical violence is not just a gang problem, but a cultural problem. In Chicago, we find a boiling pot of people, ideas, and livelihoods all existing within the same sprawling city. More important, we see the same recurring problems that diminish the capabilities of American society as a whole distilled in this situation: generational poverty, crumbling infrastructures, segregation, and class divides are the norm.
Reiterating these ideas does not reduce their level of necessity. If anything, they should fuel righteous fury in the hearts of those with the capabilities to enact change, however small. There is no reason why buildings first burned during the riots should still stand as relics of the past. By remaining untouched, they stand as a reminder of a lost past and an impossible future.
If those large totems of strife–the poverty and segregation and infrastructure–seem impossible to combat, perhaps we should look inward.
Seeping through the cracks is a still-growing disintegration of interpersonal communication. To put it more bluntly, we are incapable of speaking to each other. There is no middle ground between hurt feelings and the finality of death. Violence becomes the end point; the "last resort" is the only resort. Life has become an intangible thing and a body the manifestation of our ills.
In 2015, newly-elected Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner froze funding (totaling $4.7 million) for Operation CeaseFire, a national initiative that employs and tasks former gang leaders and felons with intervening in the exact type of feuds that lead to unnecessary deaths. In 2013, maligned Mayor Rahm Emanuel did not renew a one-year, $1 million dollar contract for CeaseFire programs in two Chicago neighborhoods.
Is it any surprise that these arguments have become the norm?
There is no middle ground between hurt feelings and the finality of death.
When we deny institutional support to combat these problems, even on as small of a scale as CeaseFire, we enable the citizens of the city to believe their lives (and the lives of those around them) are not important. Anything goes when nothing is secure.
Is it any surprise that we accept these deaths as ingrained in the very fabric of the city?
In news reports of these incidents, "an argument" regularly slips through the cracks. But in them, I find a commonality of conflict, an acceptance of anger, and a neglect of community. When we are unable to communicate with each other, we are unable to see the humanity in each other. That refusal to accept each other's humanity makes taking a life simple.
What is there to understand and value if such a basic concept doesn't even exist to us?
