Chicago’s Great Unraveling – Glenn Loury
MATT ROSENBERG: I’ll give you some context from last weekend. Once again, we had a mass shooting in Washington Park. And I know you know where that is, just west of where I grew up in Hyde Park. I think it was nine shot or seven. I forget. Two dead. The news has now come out, police are reporting it was due to an argument facilitated by gang rivalries. And while mass shootings, in fact, in Chicago are only about four percent of gun deaths we excavated that data also the the real issue here is temper. It’s those five-dollar arguments. It’s that hot, delusional entitlement of which Rahmaan Barnes spoke. All summer long, Glenn.
People here, we talk about trauma at many levels, and there is no trauma like the trauma in the African American community from the violence, the deadly violence, the shootings. I won’t pretend to have experienced that trauma myself. But I can tell you there’s another trauma of living in the city, and the crime is now spreading. We probably talked about this last time. It’s in the white neighborhoods. It’s in the suburbs. It’s in Evanston now. It’s in Lake County, up toward the Wisconsin border. Eight shootings in one night in Waukegan. They had an emergency community meeting. So there’s another trauma. There’s the trauma of reading the news, and, boy, yeah, it sounds like a first-world problem. But then you see, my gosh, they’re losing Rogers Park and Edgewater. And to non-Chicagoans, and Glenn, you know what I mean
For ordinary people, there’s only one answer — get out.