The monsters who walk among us are our creations

The horrors of our streets and courts are our children, brothers and sisters

“Pogo,” by Walt Kelly.

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Don’t waste your energy despairing that Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted or, conversely, celebrating that the three defendants in the Ahmaud Arbery murder case were convicted.

They’re not the issue.

And it’s almost beside the point that laws in Wisconsin and Georgia encouraged what they did. 

Bobby Kennedy explained the real problem in 1964 as well as anyone actually alive describes it.

“Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves,” he wrote. “What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.”

The defendants are not really outliers. They are relatively typical, and the things they did are not new. Details aside, these things have happened many times before. We just care more about them now mainly because we have been more frequently confronted with them lately.

I used to absolve myself of responsibility for racist and violent behavior because I didn’t do it. But that isn’t entirely honest. Such abominations have occurred figuratively, if not literally, within arm’s reach. And as they have continued over the decades of my life I have done little about them.

The diseased souls of the perpetrators are my soul’s business, too. What happens in my country happens in my house. 

Yes, the Wisconsin and Georgia cases occurred because we allow people to walk around carrying guns, making uninformed decisions about what other people should be allowed to do, and consequently, whether they continue to live. But the more important point: why would anyone want to interfere in anyone else's rights, no matter the laws or circumstances? 

Because it’s what we do. We’re mean to people unlike us.

There used to be a widespread phenomenon in Chicago known as social and athletic clubs. Their mere existence explains a lot. Members, usually white, would viciously beat those of other races who ventured into their neighborhoods. They would even assign members to sit or stand outside their clubhouses, or elsewhere, to make sure the wrong people weren’t daring to walk on the sidewalk. 

SAC’s were big for a century or so, not only busy fostering racial segregation but as launching pads for politicians, including Richard J. Daley. He was the 1924 president of the Bridgeport neighborhood’s Hamburg Athletic Club, which was a significant antagonist behind the 1919 Chicago race riots.

A hundred-one years later, after organized burglary gangs attacked downtown Chicago stores in the summer of 2020, other gangs organized, Rittenhouse-like, to protect one particular neighborhood. Which neighborhood? Bridgeport. The same one as was once “protected” against outsiders by the Hamburg Club. One of the same ones where residents  attacked civil rights marchers in 1968.

It was also the same neighborhood where in 1997 three young white men kicked into a coma a 13-year-old black boy who had the temerity to ride his bicycle there. Two of them walked away with no prison time at all, despite worldwide attention.

I didn’t live in Bridgeport in 1997. I lived in Rogers Park, where around that time, a Black man who sought a drink in a white tavern was shot dead just inside the door.

The city shut down that bar. If that hadn't occurred, it probably would have thrived. 

The shooting happened because most everybody non-Black wanted it to. White people generally didn’t want Blacks in any of “their” establishments, ever. “Take it to go.”

It’s not as out-in-the-open now. But it’s still prevalent. 

Things would be better without the guns and the bad laws, the twisted judges and misled police and mean-spirited politicians. But they wouldn’t be fixed.

Our laws, law enforcement institutions and legal systems accurately reflect us. So we can’t expect them to make our problems go away. They can’t reform until we reform.

We have to change so that the worst of us don’t feel they represent us.

Change is not easy. It’ll never happen if we think it’s somebody else’s problem.

It begins and ends with our own hearts. 

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