Column: Chicago’s unending violence, and the children we’ll never have the chance to meet
Janari Ricks was a smart kid. He would’ve been a fourth grader this fall. Good at math. Loved sports. Full of energy.
The kind of kid you’d love to meet.
Same with Caleb Reed, a 17-year-old gun violence activist, a student at Mather High School. Passionate. Outspoken. Confident beyond his years.
But you won’t meet Caleb. Or Janari. Or 7-year-old Natalia Wallace. Or 13-year-old Amaria Jones.
They’ll forever be numbers to you, nothing more, a handful of the 30 children 17 or younger gunned down so far this year in Chicago. Your connection to them will never be more than short descriptions on a screen or page, maybe a photo or two flashing smiles that are gone.
Chicago violence is always quantified. It often comes in triple digits, dehumanized numbers that make folks gasp or shake their heads. Those numbers make great fodder for people whose agenda has nothing to do with saving lives or giving a flip about the people the numbers represent.
We don’t mourn numbers. We react to them, some use them and we all move on.
July was the most violent month Chicago has endured in 28 years. At least 107 people were killed.
A Tribune analysis found that 24 children 10 years old and younger have been shot in Chicago this year, three times more than at this time last year. Five of those children are dead.
That’s five kids you’ll never meet. Five humans whose potential we’ll never know. Five kids easily forgotten, because they were never more than marks in the month-by-month tally of Chicago homicides.
Writing about violence in Chicago is always a quest to get people to care. That doesn’t mean Chicagoans are uncaring or callous. It’s more a reflection of the geographic divide between the city’s homicide victims and those in neighborhoods largely untouched by street violence.
When you meet people who live in violent neighborhoods, you form a connection that makes homicide numbers come to life. When you know people who have lost children, or you’ve met a child later felled by a bullet, those numbers walk with you. You can’t forget them, and you wouldn’t want to if you could.
Years ago, I was in an elementary school classroom on the West Side, surrounded by children about the same age as Janari Ricks and Natalia Wallace. The teacher asked if any of the students knew someone who had been shot. One by one, every single child in that room raised her or his hand.
That memory remains vivid, like it was yesterday. It felt unnatural, profoundly wrong, that any child had faced such a horror. But every child around me?
Numbers haven’t looked the same since.
If you scroll through the Tribune analysis of young Chicagoans shot this year, you’ll see descriptions that repeat with a numbing cadence.
“14-year-old boy wounded in the back and shoulder.”
“10-year-old girl grazed on the hand.”
“14-year-old boy killed, 11-year-old boy wounded in foot and ankle.”
“3-year-old girl shot in the chest.”
It’s awful. All of it is awful. Unthinkable, really.
But what keeps it from becoming wholly unacceptable, I think, is that no matter how fine the reporting, no matter how moving the photos or eloquent the writing, shooting victims in this city remain strangers to the people who hold the most power to fight for change. The victims, whatever their age, are, at best, abstractions, at worst, mere numbers.
That’s why I’m writing this column, I suppose. To try to get you to think about these victims as people you’ll never meet because the ever-present violence in this city robbed you of the opportunity.
Had you or I met Caleb Reed, had we heard him speak about violence in this city and seen up close the light in his eyes, I guarantee you his death Sunday would have been a gut punch, and we would still be hunched over, breathless. Instead, we’re reading about him and shaking our heads at how wrong and messed up it all seems.
The difference in those responses is the difference between Chicago solving its seemingly endless cycle of violence and accepting it as status quo.
That’s why I’m writing this. I want to push you to step outside your comfort zone and find ways to form human connections with people in this city who have a higher-than-normal chance of becoming ignorable numbers.
Why? Because I know it works. I know the mothers and fathers I’ve met on doorsteps and in living rooms days or even hours after they lost a child to a senseless act of violence helped me see how each homicide number represents the extinguished light at the center of someone’s life.
It makes what’s happening in our city this year, last year and every year going back decades, hurt. It makes it personal. It makes you realize you’ve lost the chance to meet Caleb or Janari or Natalia or Amaria.
And it makes you angry — tear-welling, blood-boiling angry — that we can’t find the wherewithal to make it stop.
rhuppke@chicagotribune.com
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