Excerpt: I see less and less hope for the U.S with every passing day.
About, maybe, four years ago, a man got out of a car and shot thirty bullets into a group of people leaving the Falcon bar, a couple of doors down from where I lived at the time, in a first floor apartment. He was looking for a specific man, just out of prison, whom he shot and who died bleeding outside my window. I’d have to hunt for it, but I took a photograph of the bullet hole right below the window I’d been standing at. Luckily, I had the sense to get away from the windows when I heard the first shots. I’ll never forget the complete and utter silence as people outside crouched behind their cars, waiting till they knew he was gone. After a long while of the uncanny silence, I heard the shuffle of shoes and whispers as they quietly opened their car doors and screeched out of the area.
I live on the South Side of Chicago, a historically marginalised and underserved area, even in the relatively tony Hyde Park, so they never really bothered to clean off all the blood and bits. A stain remained near the pavement, from the spot where the man had been shot.
When I moved to where I live now, a gunman went on a shooting spree that started in a spot I had just walked by, making his way all the way northwards. Another time, someone walked into a nearby building and shot and killed the doorman and wounded others. Sometime after the Falcon shooting, my neighbours and I heard the distinct pop of gunshots, more than ten: I recall counting fourteen. We discussed it in neighbourhood group chats–we knew we’d heard them but the cops denied everything. By then, the Obama Presidential Center was approved, against the wishes of many living here, and the public relations machinery of the University of Chicago and the city, which actively collude to promote gentrification via intense policing, was in full force. There have been several such incidents, including robberies in a nearby coffee shop that I frequented most mornings.
All the details are blurring together and what I remember most is that each time, I happened to have narrowly escaped the possibility of a bullet or had been somewhere where someone began shooting only a little after I’d been in or around the exact same location. Each time, I thought of the place I had walked through, as if it were a block of air frozen solid with me encased in it, the target of a bullet.
I don’t say this to express any more than a sense of well, yes, worry, a sense of worry that I’ve had to push aside just to function and move around in my neighbourhood. I say this to express how banal it is in this country to live with the possibility of death or calamitous injury by shooting any and every single day.
I don’t know that I have much else to say, except that I see less and less hope for the U.S with every passing day. And I’m tired of constantly blaming the Right for this state of affairs. The hard truth we may not want to accept is that a country founded on genocide and slavery is never going to slip free from the tyranny of violence until it accepts, understands, and reconciles with its past. I don’t see that happening anytime in the future.
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Image: “Grid,” Yasmin Nair, 2022
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