For an overnight shift reporter in America's murder capital, the beat is an education in violence and its aftermath, marked by powerful snapshots of grief.What does the aftermath of murder sound like?
I stood outside the yellow tape, looking at the crumpled body of 14-year-old Damani Henard, whose name I did not yet know, surrounded by an eerie quiet.These are murders that never merit protests, nor appearances by well-dressed and immaculately coiffed civil rights activists. And that is simply, dreadfully, wrong.
That silence, one I’d hear versions of again and again, became a powerful part of my nights. Four hundred fifteen people were murdered in Chicago in 2013, more than in any other American city — and this was an improvement from the year before. I was at the scene of more than 30 of them. Most were killed by guns; many were teenagers. In Chicago last year, more than 2,100 people were shot.
Read the whole essay.
28 comments:
Well, that's nice.
On the other hand, the Trib has been flogging a "racial profiling" story on its front page that is complete nonsense.
The horrible injustice of being pulled over for talking on your cell phone while driving is transmuted into another "driving while black" myth.
No reason to stop the golf game
"What if North Korea didn't hack Sony?"
Sounds more likely than the running narrative to me, but it seem very likely that the administration doesn't actually know who did it, and yet they have no problem blaming people for shit. They seem amazingly inept at picking culprits for things that go wrong, without learning a thing from the mistakes. My suggestion to Mr. Obama in general is to STFU! Even when he has good information, he draws the wrong conclusions.
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/12/27/what-if-north-korea-didnt-hack-sony/
If there's no possible reason to blame crackers, no matter how contrived, it isn't a story.
If it bleeds, and it feeds the narrative, it leads.
The only murders that count are the ones the democrat party can use for propaganda. And the leftists can't even get the facts straight-- Then? More innocents die in the flood of hype and rage.
What if this kid's death were to be "protested?" What good would that do? None.
When I was a kid, eight or nine years old, like a million other kids I noticed things. That's a kid's job, to be a sponge, to notice things. And since I lived in close proximity to blacks I noticed the way they talked to each other. Actually, I was startled by the barely suppressed violence in their intercourse. Schmendrik would say that I was already a racisss, if only subconsciously so. No, you worthless lefty, I simply was struck by what it was impossible not to be struck by: the harshness of black on black exchanges. The point is that there is a level of violence in the black world that by white standards is extreme, has always been there and always will be there and that NOTHING can reduce. Why? Because it's a feature not a bug.
Senator Moynihan's call for "benign neglect" is still the only sane stance vis-a-vis this insoluble problem.
ricpic...when I was about the same age as you reference in your comment I saw my first dead body on the street, 8 Mile road on the border of Detroit where I lived. A woman lying on the pavement, horribly disfigured, from a car accident that threw her form a car. Like any boy kid, I was at first fascinated, then later, puzzled. She laid there for well over 2 hours...she was dead after-all and police were examining the accident scene and rending aid to those who survived. I don't recall any protest about her just left lying there for a while.
Later in my life, about 20 years later, I saw many more dead people, many torn up horribly, from mortars, bombs like napalm, or howitzers, and definitely more than 30. Life takes ugly turns now and then, yet we seem no better today at rectifying it all. Today we have insane fanatics just killing for the pure sake of it...thinking they send a message, when all they really do is snuff out innocent lives. Or just because on urban streets....more killed there than even Charles Mason could imagine. Do we have a death cult born in to our genes? Why do the various media fonts ignore the real death tolls and only focus on the propaganda worthy ones?
I truly believe we are marching backwards.
Going further...what bagoh20 said...our leaders now seem to react with speeches out of ignorance....for the inane or just the propaganda worthy events. It makes no sense to me. Frankly, I don't see a cure anytime soon. I'd agree, when in doubt, STFU. When seeing the obvious carnage on our city streets, then speak up...even if the truth is discomforting to some of us. Of course, at those times, the leadership S'sTFU for the wrong reasons. We are one weird group in this feature.
Reminds me of that quote "One man's death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic."
There won't be any race war - Charley Manson was wrong.
What has happened since those predictions in the 60's is what will continue - it is the most likely scenario. Large swaths of the Black population, will continue to underperform and languish relative to others. The causes and consequently the solutions will be ignored while racism is the scapegoat. No great reckoning will come, no war, no change for most.
But what will also continue is that many Blacks will take a different path. Just like others, they will see through the bullshit and make their own way through hard work, discipline and sacrifice. They will succeed and prosper, and will join and build a different culture. That culture of all colors and persuasions will continue to do well, and they will pass down a certain level of crumbs to the ignorant an unmotivated people who demand rather than create. It was this way in the earliest human villages even without the artificial color dividers we have grown addicted to. It has existed throughout history.
Individuals have never had a more egalitarian set of opportunities in history, and still many of all kinds choose to be parasites rather than the slightly harder path of provider. Except for the severely handicapped these days, each man and woman has the choice to be useful or not to the people around them. Freedom gives them the choice, but technology and socialism is robing them of the necessity, and "necessity is the mother of invention" and evolution. Some have stopped learning, striving, evolving.
What struck me when I first read the essay was:
First, How senseless and commonplace murder has become in Chicago. You expect that gangs will hunt each other for whatever reason, but the killings of the kid on his bicycle, the kid on his front porch, the kid headed to college, and others were for no reason at all.
Second, how seeing all that must suck the life out of a reporter after a few years.
Third, how no amount of police work seems able to stop the killings.
Fourth, how awful it must be to live in the neighborhoods where the killings are commonplace. How do yo raise your kids? How can the kids who want to better themselves even get through high school, no less into college?
Fifth, how the "establishment", whatever that means, is not solving the problems that lead to so many killings. No national civil rights figure, no local aldermen, no major religious leaders, no one, is in the 'hoods working to get young people to stop killing each other.
And last, how horribly cheap and devalued human life has become in large parts of Chicago (and other major cities).
What Haz said...
I'm sorry I sort of skimmed it.
I just wish that reporters would say "killed with a gun" instead of "killed by a gun."
What seemed most missing (which is understandable, I suppose, since this was about victims) was the presence of killers. The deaths just seemed to *happen* without agency.
And I know I'm a single track song on this but really... at the very least saying "killed with a gun" implies a murderous agency behind the gun.
that's all part of the anti-2nd amendment agenda. It's the gun that did it. Not the culture or any situation that needs solving - just the gun.
April - Until earlier this year, Chicago had one of the most restrictive handgun policies in America. No private ownership, period.
A court case changed that, but there is only one gun store allowed to do business in Chicago, under very limited circumstances.
Like you said so well above, Haz - No national civil rights figure, no local aldermen, no major religious leaders, no one, is in the 'hoods working to get young people to stop killing each other.
Exactly.
Why would any leader need to arise and discuss solutions when the gun is to blame?
@bagoh20: Did you ever solve your sulfur & phosphorus assay problem?
It's only protestable if a white guy can be the perp in much the same way the Lefties didn't care about how many thousands of blacks died in Rwanda or Biafra, but 'Nam or Iraq in '03 was rrrraaaacccciiiisssstttt.
"@bagoh20: Did you ever solve your sulfur & phosphorus assay problem?"
Not entirely. I also need to measure Fe concentration. To get all three numbers I seem to have 3 alternatives:
1) In-house titration with a lot of steps and questionable accuracy due to the presence of certain ions like Cr(VI) - too much work.
2) Use a device or vendor to do some kind of Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy - expensive.
3) Pay a lab to do the chemical analysis.
I think the last option is the least expensive in effort and money. I need to do this a couple times a month. I have a 1000 gallon tank of this stuff in my process.
In between drink, motorcycles, and fornication, I took a year of Chemistry in college, so I have no depth in this field, but if you are interested, the in-house process some use involves this:
"After diluting your sample, you can titrate it with NaOH and watch for two end-points: the first, v1 - when both protons of sulfuric acid and the first proton of phosphoric acid have been neutralized (around pH 4.5); and the second, v2 - when the second proton of phosphoric acid has been neutralized (around pH 9.5). You can then calculate the molarity of phosphoric acid from v2 - v1 and the molarity of sulfuric acid from [v1 - (v2 - v1)]/2 = v1 - v2/2 after accounting for proportionality through the known volumes and NaOH concentration.
The end-points are well separated and can best be detected potentiometrically or thermometrically. If you need to rely on indicators (e.g. bromocresol green for the first end-point and thymolphthalein for the second), you may have to titrate two samples, one for each end-point (unless somebody can think of a combination of indicators that works without mutual interference at these particular pH values).
"In order to titrate iron in the solution you need to reduce it quantitatively to Fe(2+). A simple way to do that is to pass the sulfuric acid solution through a bismuth column. This is simply a small liquid chromatography column filled with 25-50 (or better, 50-100) mesh high purity Bi particles. I have used a 0.8 or 1.0 cm I.D., 20-25 cm long filled column. My experience has been with dilute (1-2 M) sulfuric acid. I don't think the phosphoric acid would interfere, at least thermodynamically speaking. If you decide to use this method, be sure to keep all the bismuth submerged in acid at all times, to rinse it well with acid before the analysis, to pass the sample solution through it at no more than about 20 ml/min (use a little vacuum in the receiving flask if gravity is not enough), and to rinse the column after the sample into the receiving flask with an amount of dilute sulfuric acid equal to at least 3 times its estimated intergranular empty volume. The solution in the receiving flask is immediately titrated with calibrated KMnO4 solution (watch for stable faint pink).
This technique is similar to the better known Jones (Zn/Hg) and silver reductors, but the column is much easier to prepare (pour Bi particles in; rinse with acid) and to maintain, and selectivity is quite high. I know that Ni, Co, Ti and Sn(4+) do not interfere, and I am sure the same is true of a few additional metals. If Cr is present, a K2Cr2O7 (dichromate) titration may have to be used instead of permanganate because permanganate can oxidize Cr(3+). Unlike permanganate, dichromate requires an end-point indicator or a potentiometric method. For a typical (not necessarily optimal) dichromate procedure see "Volumetric Analysis of Metal Finishing Solutions" [link is to info about the book at Amazon] by Andrew McFadyen, Finishing Publications Ltd.--, p. 154."
Like I said, too much work. How you gonna fit any fornication in with all that stuff going on?
Like I said, too much work. How you gonna fit any fornication in with all that stuff going on?
But doesn't fornication involved a lot of tit rating and looking for stable pink end points?
You should be a pro.
What you'll need bags, is a couple old fashioned burets, some flasks, a glass chromatography columns, some dyes and eyedroppers, and some good clean distilled water. Not sure where to get bismuth particles but I'm sure it's not controlled nor hazardous.
Oh hell no! I'm not getting in bed with all that hardware. That is some sick shit.
OK if you're that squeamish, you can spell it "burette" instead of "buret." Just be sure to get the ones with teflon stopcocks. Oh and I forgot volumetric flasks - the ones shaped like a woman's behind.
The teflon stopcocks never stick and don't need lube.
The volumetric flasks are for all the serial dilutions...
It must get damned frustrating trying to eat serial out of one of those flask things, but I'm no chemist.
And the Black community seems ill served by its political leadership. It seems like 90% of Black Congressmen/women are fools, charlatans, crooks, or left-wing crazies.
Of course they're all Democrats, so there's that.
rcocean...you mean like Hank Johnson's (D-GA) allegation that Guam might tip over? :-))
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