Bloody, yet birthy during holiday weekend – Chicago now over 500 dead

Crystal Myers of the Back of the Yards neighborhood gave birth Monday to a son, and if he survives he’s going to have one heck of a birth story to share with people.

Because the Labor Day holiday weekend was one that saw 13 people killed and dozens more wounded – including his parents. It also was the tally that boosted Chicago to having in excess of 500 homicides for the 2016 calendar year thus far.

CONSIDER THERE ARE nearly four more full months to go this year. Who’s to say how high the death toll will get for Chicago – although I can only hope we won’t experience the days of the late 1980s when the city used to get close to 1,000 murders per year and where in some neighborhoods gunfire and death were just a common fact of daily life.

Myers’ son is going to be able to point to write-ups in both the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times of the circumstances under which he was born a few weeks early on Monday.

His parents, Myers and Albert Moore, were sitting on a porch in the South Side neighborhood where the stockyards once existed when someone snuck up the gangway, fired nine shots, then fled.

Doctors at Stroger Hospital managed to save the baby, while both Myers and Moore were recovering from their own gunshot wounds and it was uncertain Tuesday how they would turn out.

THE SUN-TIMES REPORTED a lack of a motive for the shooting, although police speculated to the newspaper the incident may somehow be tied in to a shooting that took place the day before.

Here’s hoping for the kid’s sake, at least, that both survive along with the boy. Who gets to begin his life as the human face of just how absurd urban violence has become.

And how divided we are as a society in determining what the real problem is and what needs to be done about it.

For the record, 13 people were killed across the city, with 65 people suffering gunshot wounds. Most of the violence came on the holiday itself – some 31 of the 65 were shot from Monday 6 a.m. to Tuesday 3 a.m., according to the Tribune.

THE USUAL TRIVIAL analysis says that urban violence picks up during the summer months – the intense heat that we in Chicago think of as routine for August somehow gets us all riled up and crazy and our tempers go flying off the handle!

Could this line of logic mean that cooler weather will bring cooler temperaments and that the rate of shootings ending in death will decline in coming months? Who’s to say? The fact is that people tend to want to view the statistics concerning urban violence in ways that back up their own personal hang-ups.

There are those who will want to put the focus on trying to keep firearms out of the hands of people who can’t keep control of themselves, while others will want to view it as the fault of certain types of people living down to their nature.

Which usually will result in those individuals wanting to scream and screech their bigotries aloud and claim their own need to keep a weapon on hand.

WHILE OTHERS WILL want to “tsk, tsk” the situation away and pay attention to their own isolated neighborhood where they’d like to pretend such things never happen because the local residents are “just too civilized” to do such things.

I’m of the belief that such acts can take place anywhere at any time – a holdover from my own police reporting days of three decades ago where I encountered so many nonsensical acts that I came to realize there is no making sense of any of it.

With that thought in mind, I’m willing to wish Crystal Myers’ son into this world and I’d like to tell him the circumstances behind his birth are the screwiest he’ll ever encounter in life – it’s all uphill from here!

I only wish I could make him such a promise, and have it come true.

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Does your neighborhood “matter enough” to get mention by Old Navy?

I still remember a dispute I had once with one of my editors at the City News Bureau of Chicago of old with regards to identifying neighborhood names within stories.

 

The t-shirt take, ...

I believed then (and still do) that telling where something happened in Chicago is significant, and that since Chicago is such a neighborhood-oriented city it helps to know the 77 official (and 120-plus unofficial) neighborhoods that comprise the city.

MY EDITOR DISAGREED, saying she believed that some neighborhoods just weren’t well-known or significant enough to be worth mentioning.

Lincoln Park and Bridgeport? Yes.

Clearing? Probably not, as opposed to just thinking of it as the place where Midway Airport jets.

And as for the East Side? Hell no, because it’s too confusing for those marketing-oriented geeks who want to think of Streeterville as the New East Side, compared to the neighborhood so named because it is the community located east of the Calumet River.

I COULDN’T HELP but remember this decades-old newsroom discussion on Monday when I read a Chicago Tribune report about the “controversy” arising over a new t-shirt being sold at Old Navy stores.

Personally, I don’t shop there. So I wouldn’t have known firsthand. But it seems the store that likes to think it is hip and happening (or whatever cutesy terms are used to mean the same thing these days) has a new Chicago-oriented t-shirt.

It is an outline of the city limits, with neighborhood names printed on it in a crude approximation of where those neighborhoods are located.

You can wear a trendy map of Chicago on your chest, if you so wish!

EXCEPT THAT THE map is so crude that there’s no way one could use the illustration to tell where anything is in the city.

Also, the map only designates 21 neighborhoods or communities – far fewer than the aforementioned number of neighborhoods that actually exist within Chicago.

 

... as opposed to the real thing!

Which means most people don’t even get to see their neighborhoods included.

Live in Rogers Park, Logan Square, Sauganash, Humboldt Park, Pilsen, Canaryville, South Shore, Pullman or Hegewisch – just to name a few? Forget it, you’re not on the list.

I WOULDN’T HAVE realized how significant some think Lincoln Park was, except it comes across as SO BIG on the map. While Hyde Park is so dinky – it barely fits into the South Side mix.

Personally, as someone who is a native of the 10^th Ward (South Chicago, with relatives in the East Side, South Deering and Hegewisch), I find it comical that the entire southeast corner of Chicago gets designated as “Lake Calumet.”

Although considering that the key element that unites the 10^th Ward neighborhoods is their proximity to Lake Calumet and the Calumet River, that’s not the most inaccurate description of the area.

I’m more intrigued by the description of “Polish Village,” which according to the t-shirt is northwest somewhere between Belmont Heights and Lake View.

NOW I’M AWARE that there are still traces along Milwaukee Avenue of the Polish ethnic neighborhoods of old that used to dominate the Northwest Side. Although I’ve never heard of a specific community bearing that name.

If anyone can tell me of a neighborhood by that name, I’d like to know. Otherwise, I’m going to presume it a generic name for the area. (It is one of the unique aspects of Chicago that even at age 49, there are still new things I learn about the city).

 

Is the whole of North Side "Wrigleyville?"

Then, there is the area on the t-shirt designated as “Stockyards.” Which refers to the area just south of the Bridgeport neighborhood where stockyards used to exist, but is now the Chicago Stockyards Industrial Park.

It’s kind of a shame that the actual neighborhoods around there didn’t get included.

AS IN THE Back of the Yards and Canaryville neighborhoods.

Personally, I think those are two of the most off-beat neighborhood names in all of Chicago. Definitely more interesting than those North Side-oriented people who want to say they live in Wrigleyville – no matter how far away from Wrigley Field they actually live.

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What should we think – 13 shot, 0 dead

Should we be outraged about the gang-related shooting incident in the Back of the Yards neighborhood that managed to see 13 individuals get hit by gunfire?



Back of Yards, Englewood ignored too often

Or should we feel blessed that this outburst doesn’t add a single digit to the Chicago murder tally for 2013 – it seems that no one has died, and doctors say they expect all to survive.

SHOULD WE THINK of this as an outrage and evidence of the depravity of urban life – literally the worst violent outburst in Chicago since the St. Valentine’s Day massacre (I literally stumbled across someone on Facebook who made that comment)?

Or should we view this as the fluke incident that it would appear to be – usually when we get a dozen or so people shot in a single day, it’s because there were 10 or so incidents that were all completely unrelated. Except for the fact that they all occurred on the same day?

Is this incident going to provoke another outburst of people urging their political people to push for tougher restrictions related to firearms? Which will tick off the firearms fanatics and create another burst of partisan nonsense!

Or is this incident, combined with the shooting incident earlier this week at the U.S. Naval Yard, going to be the motivation that kills off the “gun control” movement once and for all.

YES, I HAVE read that theory put forth on the Internet as well. There’s a whole lot of nonsense that gets written up by people with too much time on their hands.

And now, we get to take into account the latest incident that put Chicago in the national news Friday morning – to the point where it was detracting from the partisan rhetoric emanating from Capitol Hill to try to kill off health care reform by holding the rest of the federal government hostage.

I’ll bet the guy who pulled out a high-powered rifle at a pickup basketball game at Cornell Park on 51^st Street and opened fire – hitting a 3-year-old boy and 12 others – never realized he could have such an impact upon our society.

If it weren’t for all the bloodshed, a part of me would be inclined to thank the guy for taking attention away from the conservative ideologues who probably will defend, to their deaths, the right of that guy to have a military-type weapon with him on the playground!

PERSONALLY, I’M INCLINED to think that Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy hit the right tone when he described the late Thursday incident as a “miracle,” as in no one was killed (although as I write this commentary, that 3-year-old remained in critical condition at Mount Sinai Hospital).

Put this incident into perspective – an auto accident at 56^th and Morgan streets (just over a mile from the park early Friday in the Englewood neighborhood) killed a 2-year-old girl, giving it a higher death tally!

But the fact that the Chicago Sun-Times found people who said it is not uncommon for people to show up around the park and fire off gunshots (“Just gang-banging stuff. It’s what they do,” is how one person described it to the newspaper) is a sad comment on where we have gone as a society.

As for those who want to believe that, somehow, we’d be better off if more people would be armed, I’d think this incident shows the nonsense level of that line of thought. Would we be better off if someone in the park had been able to pull out a pistol and fire back? Or would we merely be talking about 16 or 17 people shot, instead of just 13?

ALTHOUGH JUST A little bit more legalese written into the law concerning firearms isn’t going to change things all by itself. It’s going to take serious attention paid to these urban neighborhoods to try to raise their overall expectations from life.

Instead of our current status, which is that most of us ignore such neighborhoods. Seriously, when was the last time you were anywhere near 51^st Street and Western Avenue (just two blocks west of the park)? When was the last time you even thought about going out there?

That sense of being ignored by the “other” Chicago is what creates an atmosphere where some people think it’s no big deal to shoot up a park. They probably figure that no one who gets wounded or killed would be missed.

That’s the tragedy!

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