Violence and CPS Students

As Blair Holt lay bleeding to death in the aisle of a CTA bus Friday afternoon, his last words to the paramedics desperately trying to save him were to tell his parents that he loved them. The Julian High School student had been shot in the abdomen while pushing a girl out of the way of gunfire. He was 16 years old. Exactly eight months earlier, Fernando Haywood was shot and killed on the Far South Side, less than one week into his junior year at Fenger High School. He was 17. In between these two slayings, 25 other students in the Chicago Public School system were killed- bringing the total to 27 for the academic year. That is one child killed every ten days. How can we even begin to make sense of a statistic as staggering as that?

When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold massacred 12 students at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999 it created a media frenzy. National news outlets carried the story for weeks on end while the country tried to come to grips with this horrific event. Only a handful of events in American history have received more coverage.

Meanwhile, some of the boys and girls killed in Chicago barely managed to make page 1 of the metro section. Of course, it is an unfair comparison to equate media coverage of these killings to that of the Columbine massacre. But that doesn't mean the lack of attention paid to the various Chicago victims has been warranted. All too often it seems we approach these murders as just another act of senseless violence- another bad neighborhood, another gun, another kid dead before their 18th birthday. We sit and read about students like Blair and Fernando- shake our heads- and continue on to advice columns or stock tips, sports scores and politics. Perhaps we are just desensitized to youth violence ever since the shooting at Columbine; maybe that is why we can read a story like Blair Holt’s and move on immediately to “Is Offbeat Stylist Cut Out to be a ‘Shear Genius’?” without skipping a beat. Then again, can I really blame us for not taking to the streets every time someone innocent is killed? A look at some of the stories from this morning’s metro section:

-“Teen Held in Fenton Plot” (A high school student arrested for planning a school shooting)
- “Victims Families Confront Brown’s ‘Killer’ Luna” (families of victims of the infamous 1993 Brown’s Chicken massacre are seeking the death penalty for the killer)
- “Beating Victim’s Account Disputed”
-“Mistrial Declared in Maywood Killing”
-“Teens Face Hate-Crime Charge for Anti-gay Flier”
-“Slain Teens Funeral Site Moved to a Larger Venue”
-“3 Officers Are Charged in Taped Beating at Bar”
-“Teen Accused in Bomb Scare”

As it turns out, all of those stories came before the obituary section where, ironically enough, Leonard Eron's life was chronicled. Dr. Eron was the renowned psychologist who first demonstrated a link between watching violence on television and being more aggressive and violence-prone.

So what are we to make of all of those stories? Hate and violence permeates our news, and it seems there is nothing we can do about it. That may very well be the case, but I'd like to think otherwise- it is too depressing not to. For one thing, all of us can get angry. Senseless violence cannot be erased from our collective future if we continue to meet it with steely indifference in the present. We can only relegate this bloodshed to a sad and dark chapter of our past by confronting it somehow in the here and now. Maybe that won’t happen until the names of victims stop reading as Delmont and Dijohn, Lupita and Tashema, and start reading as Tom and Chris, Emily and Sarah. But maybe I’m not giving us enough credit- maybe we can do something about it now. Mailing Blair Holt’s yearbook photo to every single NRA lobbyists or pro-gun member of Congress might be a place to start.