A Voice Raised in ChicagoBy
Bob HerbertThe New York TimesSenator Barack Obama took his presidential campaign to Chicago Sunday, where he addressed an agonizing issue that has been largely overlooked by the national media — the murder of dozens of the city’s public school students since last September.
Speaking to an overflow crowd of worshipers at the Vernon Park Church of God, Mr. Obama, a resident of Chicago, said:
“I asked to come here because I wanted to talk with you about the spate of violence that’s been robbing the city’s children of their future. In this last school year, 32 Chicago public school students were killed, and even more since the school year ended. This past week alone, two teens were shot in a South Side schoolyard.”
You’ve probably heard more than you wanted to about David Beckham and Posh Spice in recent days, but not a lot about the deaths of these children and teenagers in Chicago. Black, Latino and poor, they are America’s invisible children.
“In one Chicago public school,” said Mr. Obama, “a teacher was calling attendance, and when she got to the name of a particular student who wasn’t there and had missed a lot of classes, she asked if anyone knew where he was. And the answer she got was, ‘He’s dead.’ ”
He mentioned another school: “In Room 104 at Avalon Park Elementary School, an empty chair is pushed against the wall in memory of Quinton Jackson, the eighth grader who used to sit there, and who was stabbed to death a few months ago.”
And he mentioned Blair Holt, 16, who was riding home from school on a city bus when a gunman opened fire. “As the bullets flew, and Blair was shot,” the senator said, “he pulled a friend onto a seat and saved her life. And as he was driven to the hospital, where he would pass away a short time later, he asked the paramedics to tell his parents that he loved them.”
Over the past school year, Mr. Obama said, the number of public school students killed in Chicago was higher than the number of soldiers from the entire state of Illinois who were killed in Iraq during that period.
As I mentioned in a previous column on this issue, Chicago is hardly alone when it comes to the slaughter of youngsters who are living in conditions that can fairly be compared to combat.
“From South-Central L.A. to Newark, New Jersey,” said Senator Obama, “there’s an epidemic of violence that’s sickening the soul of this nation. For the third year in a row, violent crime and murder are on the rise nationwide. As we’ve all borne witness to here in Chicago, this is partly due to the rise of gang violence. The F.B.I. says there are now more gang members on our nation’s streets than police officers.”
The senator talked about the need for more stringent gun control laws, and he criticized the Bush administration for “decimating” a Clinton administration initiative that had added more than 100,000 police officers to local departments.
He said governments need to do more to combat gangs and gang violence and invest more in after-school programs that provide an alternative to the streets for vulnerable youngsters.
But he added, “There is only so much government can do.” There is also a need, he said, “for a change in attitude.”
The senator talked about the young men and boys who have gone down “the wrong path.” And he said one of the main reasons they are wreaking havoc and shooting one another is that they had not received enough attention while growing up from responsible adults.
“We’re not reading to them,” he said. “We’re not sitting down with them and talking to them. We’re not guiding them. We’re not disciplining them.”
In a conversation yesterday, he stressed that the plight of young people struggling in tough environments demands both governmental attention and a heightened sense of individual responsibility. Both are essential.
He said in his speech that he will keep fighting in Washington for more money and more programs. “But that money and those programs,” he said, “will not make any difference unless we have a change of heart.”
He also noted that there was tremendous grief across the country when the massacre at Virginia Tech happened last April, “and rightfully so.” But with 34 schoolkids dead in Chicago since the beginning of the last school year, he said, “for the most part, there has been silence.”
It’s important, he said, that Americans reach a mind-set in which “we care just as much” about the children slain in Chicago as those killed at Virginia Tech.
Photo Credit: Bob Herbert. (The New York Times)
Hooked on ViolenceBy
Bob HerbertThe New York TimesTwo days after the massacre at Virginia Tech, a mentally disturbed man with a .40-caliber semiautomatic handgun opened fire in a house in Queens, killing his mother, his mother’s disabled companion and the disabled man’s health care aide. The gunman then killed himself.
Sixteen months ago, in the basement of a private home in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, four aspiring rappers, aged 19 to 22, were summarily executed in a barrage of semiautomatic gunfire. Two teenagers were arrested five months later, and one was charged as the gunman.
I had coffee the other day with Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, and she mentioned that since the murders of Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, well over a million Americans have been killed by firearms in the United States. That’s more than the combined U.S. combat deaths in all the wars in all of American history.
“We’re losing eight children and teenagers a day to gun violence,” she said. “As far as young people are concerned, we lose the equivalent of the massacre at Virginia Tech about every four days.”
The first step in overcoming an addiction is to acknowledge it. Americans are addicted to violence, specifically gun violence. We profess to be appalled at every gruesome outbreak of mass murder (it’s no big deal when just two, three or four people are killed at a time), but there’s no evidence that we have the will to pull the guns out of circulation, or even to register the weapons and properly screen and train their owners.
On the day after Christmas in 2000, an employee of Edgewater Technology, a private company in Wakefield, Mass., showed up at work with an assault rifle and a .12-gauge shotgun. Around 11 a.m. he began methodically killing co-workers. He didn’t stop until seven were dead.
An employee who had not been at work that day spoke movingly to a reporter from The Boston Globe about the men and women who lost their lives. “They were some of the sweetest, smartest people I’ve ever had the chance to work with,” he said. “The cream of the crop.”
The continuing carnage has roused at least one group of public officials to action: mayors. “We see the violence that is happening in America today,” said Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston. “Illegal guns are rampant. Go into almost any classroom in Boston — sixth and seventh grade, eighth grade, high school — and 50 percent of those kids know somebody who had a gun.”
The mayor noted that since the beginning of the year, more than 100 people have already been killed in Philadelphia, and nearly 80 in Baltimore. Most of the victims were shot to death.
Last year Mayor Menino and Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, at a meeting they hosted at Gracie Mansion, organized a group of mayors committed to fighting against illegal firearms in the U.S. “It is time for national leadership in the war on gun violence,” Mr. Bloomberg said at the time. “And if that leadership won’t come from Congress or come from the White House, then it has to come from us.”
The campaign has grown. There were 15 mayors at that first gathering. Now more than 200 mayors from cities in 46 states have signed on.
When asked why Mayor Bloomberg had become so militant about the gun issue, John Feinblatt, the city’s criminal justice coordinator, mentioned the “human element.” He said: “I think it’s because he’s watched eight police officers be shot. And because, like all mayors, he’s the one who gets awakened, along with the police commissioner, at 3 in the morning and 4 in the morning, and has to rush to the hospital and break the news that can break somebody’s heart.”
Those who are interested in the safety and well-being of children should keep in mind that only motor vehicle accidents and cancer kill more children in the U.S. than firearms. A study released a few years ago by the Harvard School of Public Health compared firearm mortality rates among youngsters 5 to 14 years old in the five states with the highest rates of gun ownership with those in the five states with the lowest rates.
The results were chilling. Children in the states with the highest rates of gun ownership were 16 times as likely to die from an accidental gunshot wound, nearly seven times as likely to commit suicide with a gun, and more than three times as likely to be murdered with a firearm.
Only a lunatic could seriously believe that more guns in more homes is good for America’s children.
Photo Credit: Bob Herbert. (The New York Times)
Scott Ritter, Information Clearing House:"The indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby by Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald provides the most cogent and visible evidence to date of the criminal mindset that exists inside the Bush administration regarding the decision to invade Iraq...."
Bob Herbert (NYT):"The White House is sweating out the possibility that one or more top officials will soon be indicted on criminal charges. But according to Bob Herbert, the Bush administration is immune to prosecution for its greatest offense - its colossal and profoundly tragic incompetence...."
A Voice Raised in Chicago
