Bloody Hands in Chicago

A friend of mine died recently. The Friday before last. He wasn’t a close friend—I’m still not sure if that’s the perfect term—but we went to middle school and high school together, and I didn’t know him well but at times I did, and I liked him, and he was kind to me. We had gym class together. He helped me write a joke once. It got the biggest laugh of the set.

He was a wild man—played drums in a (good) band, dropped acid at least a few times, was rather strictly antiauthoritarian in his nature. He was a kind man—friendly and gentle and effusive in his excitement. He was a funny man—he was short, and he often had this big mop of black hair, and his eyes had a piercing look to them and his back was always so straight when he walked, so that he always looked very self-possessed. I can still picture him walking, having not seen the guy for eight or nine years. He was walking when he died.

My friend was shot on Chicago’s southwest side. The Friday before last. They say it was 10:30 at night, and that he was walking home, and that he was shot twice through the neck. There’s a security video of three people running away down an alley. His AirPods were in his ears when they found him.

He owned a didgeridoo in high school, and he had a poster of Albert Einstein on his wall—the one where Einstein’s tongue’s sticking out. He lived over on the north shore of the lake. When my parents moved onto the water our senior year, he pointed out to me once which house was his across the half-mile of ice. The north shore of Crystal Lake’s set apart on a dead end, but you run past his house if you run around the lake, and you float past his house if you’re out on a pontoon, and every Christmas morning I wake up in my parent’s home I will come downstairs and I will look across the water and his house will be there, and he will not be there, because he is dead. Shot dead. Another man shot dead in Chicago. For no apparent reason. For reasons all too apparent.

The person or people who killed my friend chose to do just that. It was not some act of nature. It was a choice—a conscious choice to kill. Folks sometimes talk about environment in this and circumstance in this and how privileged so many of us are, and there’s bits of truth in all that—we’ll get to the bits of truth in all that next—but there’s a chilling, simple reality here too: Someone, or someones, chose to kill my friend. That person or those people made a choice.

Chicago is, in many places and in many ways, a broken society. Innocents aren’t gunned down in societies which aren’t broken. And societies don’t just break, either. They are actively broken. Broken by people. Yes, there’s societal stuff, and there’s historical stuff, and there’s passive stuff, but there are also just so many mistakes. Mistake upon mistake upon mistake. The worst are the calculated mistakes. The ones that, again, are chosen. Political decisions. Career decisions. Decisions of personal gain via public sacrifice.

The responsibility to keep societies unbroken falls upon societies, both loosely and tightly defined. It falls upon those living in the heart of the broken places, and upon people like me, raised peripherally to places like Chicago. But particular people take on these responsibilities directly, and their mistakes are the most direct, and their calculated mistakes are the ones that are galling.

Those who work in public service—and that term can be used loosely, covering everything from churches to courts to community centers to schools to public works to media to policing to so much more—take on a weighty responsibility. At their jobs’ most consequential, the price of mistakes is measured in lives. It’s measured in blood.

I think the best of these public servants know this. It’s what makes them the best. It’s why they do what they do—to keep blood in the body, to keep life in the body; to publicly serve, to serve the public; to unbreak society, to prevent its breaking. But to so many, to far too many, public service is some competition, or some game, or some exercise in personal gain. It’s a career, not a calling, or if it appears a calling to these worst of them it appears so in a twisted, messianic way, where their cause is indisputably just and, coincidentally, that justice aligns with whatever benefits them the most personally. You see this from elected officials. You see this from police unions. You see this from teachers unions. You see it so brazenly in Chicago. It’s brazen in other places too. It’s brazen down here in Texas, where the governor is willing to drive up food prices for his own nation and to leave people in jail without trial for months on end and to allow and enable worse things, worse-to-write things, worse-to-write things in a writing about a kind young man who was shot twice through the neck—all for said governor’s political and financial gain. But the brazenness in Chicago is so directly measurable. People fail institutions. Institutions fail. Lives are the cost. There’s a man dead on the sidewalk. A kind young man. A man who had an Einstein poster, and who played the drums, and who owned a didgeridoo. There’s blood on the hands of those who chose to serve. And it can only be seen by those whose fault it isn’t.

Late yesterday afternoon, I passed a parking lot where a pigeon was lying, face down, head turned to one side. Another pigeon pecked at its neck. I don’t know exactly what was happening. I hope it was some preening I didn’t understand. But it looked like the first pigeon, the one lying down, was dead, or dying, and the other just kept pecking at it. Just kept taking more from it. Just kept taking more and more and more.

There’s blood on their hands.