oday is Monday, 12th October, 2020. The Chicago Sun Times reported five people were killed, and 48 others were injured by gunfire over the past weekend in the City of Chicago. Five of those wounded were teenagers. Last weekend saw 37 people shot throughout the city, five of them fatally. So it's another typical weekend in Chicago. Sometimes the weekend violence in Chicago is so bad that it even gets reported in the national CBC news update roundups heard at the top of the hour in CBC radio stations across the country. In Canada. However, you will not hear much talk of it in Chicago itself. I know because I lived there for eight years. To talk about it is to be a traitor.
It's rather difficult to articulate the extent of my perennial uneasiness toward the city and its people. Ultimately, what bothers me most about Chicago is this unfathomable level of gun violence and homicides that perpetuate in the city that's being willfully ignored, and it's the main reason why it will not go away anytime. It's called 'Chi-raq' for a reason. This crisis has been around for decades. I mostly lived in relatively well-off Old Town (with stints in Uptown, Rogers Park, and Hyde Park thrown in), but I had always heard the sound of gunshots at least few times a week drifting over from the poorer neighbourhoods like Cabrini Green. Even I shrugged them off, because that's the way it is, and that's the way it's always have been, and at least they're not shooting at me or at my friends. (Actually, this is not entirely the case, but that story of my close friends' inadvertently being caught in the crossfire of a gun battle while driving in hipster Wicker Park would have to wait for now.) The people we know do not associate with any gang members. It's not our problem, but this attitude kills people.
f you bring up this topic, most white Chicagoans have this pathological knee-jerk boosterism, which is unique to Chicago, and almost unheard of in large cities in the developed world. If you mention that its population has been in perpetual decline since 1950, when the city's population peaked at 3.62 million people, you are immediately attacked as some sort of Chicago hater. Mention anything negative would get you into trouble, even with the people you live with. To wit, whenever the media drops a negative or unflattering story about a place, whether truthful or otherwise, say about LA or New York, or even here about inconsquential Vancouver, its inhabits generally do not give a fuck, let alone would they give it another glance. They're too busy doing their own things to give a damn. Not so in Chicago! They'll obsess over it. They'll declare the publication an outrage, a vendetta against their beloved city!
Even close friends and people with whom I had lived with and engaged in carnal relations have been afflicted with this unusual pathology. They get offended easily and take it personally, sometimes even when you make an ostensibly innocuous, apolitical observation. However, this perverted outpouring of civic pride allows them to conveniently ignore the reality of decades of systematic state and citizen-instituted racism and segregation, which they are inadvertently maintaining with that same attitude. More precisely, the level of violence will not get any better, partly because most of its citizens who reside in wealthier neighbourhoods, even those who may consider themselves progressive, choose to ignore the violence by saying things like it doesn't really concern them, and that that's not the real Chicago. They'll say that normal residents or visitors shouldn't be concerned or worried, since the violence only happens way over there-- to the west and south sides, where the city's Black and Latino communities live. However, it's where the majority lives, but then it only happens to those people. What they're really saying is that Blacks and Latinos do not count-- just don't think about them. That's how they are. They are not going to change. They're not normal people. They do not belong. They do not represent us. They're not the real Chicago, which is such a wonderful world-class city.
12 October 2020
