Like a Ton of Bricks...

I stayed at my folks house last night because I was too exhausted to make it home. When I got up and sat down to a bowl of Basic 4, one of my favorites, the Chicago Tribune was lying on the counter. I picked it up and, scanning the front page, noticed a small blurb in the bottome left corner showing a picture of a smiling girl. The text accompanying the photo read something to the account of "13 year old shot and is brain dead." Unbelievable, I thought, another kid in the hood dead from gang related gun violence. I flipped to the Metro section to see if my presumption was accurate. As I began reading, it wasn't the fact that some smiling little girl was dead that got to me as much as the realization that I actually knew her. Eternity Gaddy was one of the kids in the Summer program which I was taught at Humboldt park. I am not going to say that Eternity was my favorite student or anything, far from it, but I've always found it hard or insensitive, or at least unproductive to try to accuratly describe people who have died recently. So let's just say that I didn't know her well enough to give an accurate account of her character.

This is new territory for me. Death is something that I haven't dealt with very much in my life, but it seems that since my friend Hank died in a car accident, I've been faced with it more and more. Even more so, I see that these kids in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, and others in Chicago, who are seasoned veterans of dealing with death. Think about it, how many people do you know, personally, who have been shot and killed? I don't think I've ever known anyone up until now, and am not proud to say that now I do. If I had to guess how many of the kids I workded with this summer personally knew someone who was shot an killed, my guess is that the number would be more than fifty percent, but could certainly be much higher. Gun violence in Chicago's black neighborhoods is out of control. A quick internet search reveals numbers like 27 kids in the nine months so far of 2008, 196 Chicago school children in the last decade. According to a channel 7 news article, one demonstration occurred where participants painted signs with the number "32" repesenting the number of Chicago Public School children killed (in a certain amount of time that was not given) and by the end of the rally, the number was 33.

None of these statistics will keep me from working in the hood, nor will they keep me from bringing friends to those neighborhoods. I am not going to spend my time idly asking god to spare those kids. In fact I don't know how this will change what I do or think. I spoke with my dad about it and he pointed out that she was shot at five to two in the morning. He said that maybe if she hadn't been out past curfew, this would never have happened. His point seemed to be that if people would just obey the laws set in place for their protection, the would be protected. Obeying curfew may have saved Eternity's life this time, but is that the solution? Do we all need to be ordered around because we don't know what's good for us? I don't know, and I hope not.

When things like this happen, people come out of the wood work pointing fingers at whatever problem they think causes problems. I've heard them all, rap music, video games, MTV, lack of a good family, the list goes on. But what I see as the problem is more of a cultural thing.

I wrote about the summer Ultimate program on my family's blog and mentioned that the kids live in constant competition, unfortunetly they are competing to be cool, not smart, not better at sports, but who's cool. If you are less cool than the guy next to you, that is to say if you're wearing old jeans, shoes, jewelry, or have a less than par haircut, you get ripped on. If you can't fire back, well then you lose, and when you lose, that's it, you'll never hear the end of it. So why can't we have these kids compete to be smart and good at somthing productive? Why don't we harness that competitive spirit and put it to good use? We as a nation, glorify those who make it rich or are successful in spite of being ignorant or not being worth a damn (I was writing in response to my uncle ranting about Flava Flav and his reality show "The Flavor of Love). So, what might that have to do with the sudden increase in gun violence? It could be that these kids see the short term advantages of the life of gang bangers, it could be that they are stalked at school by gangs and are somehow coerced into joining (this was actually the case for a young man in Ed and Matt's program, although he had not given in and remained free from gang involvment). Whatever the case is, these kids have to work very hard to succeed at anything, even something as simple as staying out of trouble. Everything is harder in their lives.

I've been writing this entry while sitting at Lush and have been distracted and interrupted several times so I'm losing focus. I just thought that this was something I should write about.

Here is the link to the article:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-girl-shot-both-01-sep01,0,652061.story?track=rss