[Derrion Jones, a sixteen-year-old honor student, was beaten to death on his way home from school in Chicago—a city which has suffered the violent deaths of 34 school-age children in the past year. Attention to this tragic incident has reached through city and state government to the Obama White House. In the wake of recent events, Ibrahim Abusharif reflects on the toll of youth violence.]
It’s a small grace of life that people with winsome projects are easy to spot. As I waited for a train at the LaSalle Street station in Chicago, I met an elderly lady from Washington State who drove to the Midwest only to take pictures of lighthouses. There are many lighthouses in the Great Lakes region, she told me, more than 140 of various shapes and histories. She drove alone and spent more than $800 worth of gas to pursue her unusual passion, staying some nights at various towns along the way. It was enjoyable to hear her speak the way she did.
Then she asked about neighborhoods, and I told her what I knew. Violent deaths are a scourge in Chicago among school-age children, especially on the South Side, where I had once lived in my childhood (Walcott Avenue to be exact). It’s become a statistic to keep track of: the number of school-age children who are murdered, sometimes on school grounds, during a school year, which means the academic year is properly hyphenated. The punctuation gives bone to the unholy facts, but it also creates another set of suburban record-keeping to conjure with. In other words, it makes the reality more abstract, a bit easier to study as citizens.
I teach in Doha, Qatar, throughout most of the year, and I keep up with Chicago news and baseball scores as a matter of routine. I often come across a news item about a felled Chicago public school student, sometimes with an embedded journalistic running count of how many have been lost so far.
Being far away from the city and the country itself alters my reception of the news. Disrobed of important cultural breastplates, I have a hard time receiving the news as “blight as usual.” Most of the victims died from bullets, many of them apparently “stray” bullets meant for someone else. I don’t know if the intended victims have any idea how close they came to their own demise or what little bodies involuntarily saved their lives. As a rule, most of the abstractions are inner-city youth, mainly African Americans, who apparently have the expected duty to die young and unaccomplished, while their mothers weep with an obligatory news camera trained on their surrendered faces.
Mayor Daley has made sure to let us know how upset he is, as have many community leaders, religious figures, and urban activists. Together they have marched the streets shouting for an end to the violence and have held press conferences about the impiety. Rituals follow the violence as a matter of urban sacrament: volunteers staple letter-size paper onto neighborhood trees with the big word “STOP.” Well-wishers drop off stuffed animals and flowers; and they sign, of course, large posters with handwritten prayers, outlines of hearts, and references to the supernal (like “heaven” and “our little angel”), but after the crime tape has been removed and after Chicago firefighters have hosed away the red from the sidewalk.
Stray bullets, children, and official anger: these should be difficult matters to ponder, especially when you wonder what indictment this problem should naturally call up. When violence erupts in the world (especially in developing, non-cross bearing lands) the diagnoses of the self-appointed grand juries of our hemisphere are swift to follow with recommendations to the East that are hardly subtle about closely-held beliefs and scriptures.
But are we permitted to explore what the heartbreak means for Chicago, my hometown, and for America? How do we interpret it: as something that points to a larger problem, or as an unpleasant peccadillo mitigated by our estimations of national greatness? May we suggest a review of the political and cultural temper of our systems (skipping over the typical outrage about video games and single-parent households)? Is the religious leadership open to reviewing church teachings and verses that help inform the national mood on such matters as race? And what about some core ethos, the unmovable parts of cherished secular paradigms, which curiously we broadcast, spend, and bomb to spread to the world? More difficult yet and perhaps more esoteric: how do we begin to comprehend the untraceable loss of some great idea, solution, cure, aesthetic, or some other high meaning, once latent and kept in God-made trust in a youngling, now gone and pulled back by a stray bullet?
Americans live in a violent country. No euphemism can soften the reality for us. Regardless of its outward form, most violence appears to have an internal political bearing, since the killing is often about identity or someone else’s wealth. And if we really think about it, identity is so close to essence, it’s hard to imagine how to detach people, not from identity, but that problem of being lethally adverse toward the other. People, of course, have always shown the capacity to kill for political, cultural, religious, tribal, secular, city-state, or graffiti-marked loyalty. Consider the mortal modern day strife: Jew-Arab (the Holy Land), or Sunni-Shia (Iraq for example), or Protestant-Catholic (Northern Ireland for example), or competing secular economic paradigms like communist-capitalist (Vietnam, Korea, for examples), or tribal Hutu-Tutsi (Rwanda), or underground oil-no oil (Iraq), or views on human ownership and cheap labor (North and South), or urban struggle for abandoned storefronts. Et cetera.
Tags: chicago, mayor daley, obama, youth violence
The parents are not only to be blame for the violence inflicted by teens. Society has a big role in this dilemma. We all have to be responsible enough for everything that we do because kids might follow our steps even if it’s wrong. No amount of payday loans can change the fact that kids are kids and adults should take the blame.
Many wise words have been written and spoken about this subject, often involving the word "responsibility". Let's hear what that pink shirted fellow in the video waving a railroad tie has to say for himself.
There is a set of US young people of all races and cultures who can't see the point of studying or acquiring any skills. The girls get pregnant. The boys used to be drafted. Some learned discipline and responsibility in the Army. Now they go to prison.
Years ago an AA man wrote a book about how he straightened out his life simply by leaving his poisonous urban environment and going to live in a smaller but saner town.
Maybe people are staying in these places because they have grown dependent on the benefits they receive there, and they bring up clueless children that way.
One suggestion I have heard is that neighborhood shooters who kill, say a child at play while trying to shoot someone else, should be shot themselves immediately. Would people do this if they knew their own lives would be forfeit at once?
We have to take csre of our children. We have to do much better.
We have a problem in Baton Rouge and the problem is not just with poor children. Rich children enter this cycle of death.
Yes, probably quite as many wealthy children are at a loss. Rich people send their kids to shrinks or boarding school maybe.
The similarity I think is that the kids have no sense of duty. To the world or their families.
Anyone can bring up a clueless child.
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