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Crosses Marking
Chicago Death Toll
By Kathy Kelly
January 03,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Rev. Michael Pfleger and the Faith Community of St.
Sabina Parish had issued a call to carry crosses
constructed by Greg Zanis. The crosses, uniform in size,
presented the name and age and, in many cases, a facial
photo of the person killed. Some who carried the crosses
were relatives of the people killed. As the group
assembled, several sobbed upon finding the crosses that
bore the names and photos of their loved ones.
Those carrying
the heavy crosses along Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile” of
high-end shops and restaurants knew that other arms than
theirs were aching … aching with longing for loved ones
who would never return.
In 2016, more
people were killed in Chicago by gun violence than in
New York City and Los Angeles combined. The number
killed represented a 58 percent increase over the number
killed in 2015.
“How could this
happen?” – was the question asked on the front page of
the Chicago Tribune.
It was a year
of social service program shutdowns driven by the
Governor’s office in Springfield. The Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King’s description of a triplet of giant evils,
each insoluble in isolation from the others, helps us
identify an answer to the Tribune’s question. King spoke
of the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and
militarism.
Training for,
and the diversion of money to, wars overseas was a
crisis inextricable from the race crisis at home, as
were policies promoting radical wealth inequality.
Representative Danny Davis, of Chicago, whose
grandson was killed by gun violence in 2016, insists
that “poverty was fueling the city’s bloodshed, and that
Chicago needed to make investments ‘to revamp whole
communities.’”
Poverty and
racism clearly interact: Blacks and Latinos comprise
56 percent of the incarcerated population, yet only
30 percent of the U.S. population. A report documenting
the rates of incarceration for whites,
African-Americans, and Hispanics in the Illinois state
prison system notes that over half of this prison
population is black. For every 100,000 people in the
state, 1,533 black people are imprisoned as compared to
174 white people and 282 Hispanic people.
The
consequences of incarceration affect entire communities:
former prisoners are restricted in terms of employment,
their families are disrupted, housing becomes unstable,
they become disenfranchised, and stigmas persist.
Global
Slaughters
We must also
consider gun violence in relation to U.S. militarism.
Gun violence in Chicago is condemned, as it should be,
and yet a message to every one of the 9,000 Chicago
Public School children participating in U.S. military
junior ROTC programs is that killing is acceptable if
you are following orders. Killing of civilians by the
U.S. military is considered regrettable but acceptable
“collateral damage.” These killings eliminate “high
value targets.”
The mere
suspicion of harboring a targeted person in a home,
restaurant, or mosque becomes an excuse for an airborne
drone attack to execute whole families or communities.
Ironically, this policy enacts an airborne version of a
drive-by shooting.
Soldiers who
have seen combat are less likely to praise the virtues
of military life. “The myth is that the military teaches
discipline,” say the Chicago area Veterans for Peace,
in their “education not militarization” campaign. “The
reality is that the military teaches children to follow
orders without question and to use the military solution
to conflict resolution – that is, death and
destruction.”
President Obama
had tears in his eyes in January 2016, calling for
relief from record-breaking shootings and killings in
the U.S. Yet 2016 became a record-breaking year for U.S.
export of weapons to other countries. The U.S. is
responsible for nearly 33 percent of worldwide weapon
exports — by far the top arms exporter on the planet.
“Arms deals are
a way of life in Washington,” writes William Hartung.
“From the president on down, significant parts of the
government are intent on ensuring that American arms
will flood the global market and companies like Lockheed
and Boeing will live the good life. … American officials
regularly act as salespeople for the arms firms. And the
Pentagon is their enabler. … In its first six years,
team Obama entered into agreements to sell more weaponry
than any administration since World War II.”
Carrying a
cross along Michigan Avenue, I thought of the terrible
slaughter in World War I that killed 38 million
people. Elites, weapon-makers, and war profiteers
drove millions of men into the trenches to fight and die
in the war that was to end all wars.
Christmas Truce
In 1914, mired
in mud, war-weary and miserable, troops on both sides
took matters into their own hands. For a brief, yet
magnificent time, they enabled the “Christmas truce.”
One account relates how some German troops began singing
one of their carols, and British and other troops then
sang a carol from their side. As voices wafted across
the no-man’s land, troops began calling out to one
another.
“Time and again
during the course of that day, the Eve of
Christmas, there were wafted towards us from the
trenches opposite the sounds of singing and
merry-making, and occasionally the guttural tones of a
German were to be heard shouting out lustily, ‘A happy
Christmas to you Englishmen!’ Only too glad to show that
the sentiments were reciprocated, back would go the
response from a thick-set Clydesider, ‘Same to you,
Fritz, but dinna o’er eat yourself wi’ they sausages!’”
“The high
command on both sides took a dim view of the activities
and orders were issued to stop the fraternizing with
varying results. In some areas, the truce ended
Christmas Day in others the following day and in others
it extended into January.”
Dr. King said,
“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture
the revolutionary spirit, and go out into a sometimes
hostile world declaring eternal hostility to
poverty, racism, and militarism.”
The soldiers in
those trenches went out into their no-man’s land and
showed the world one way to end wars. They should never
have had to. It was left to them to venture into the
no-man’s land, risking exposure to the others’ fire and
their generals’ punishment for disobeying orders.
No matter what
gang is issuing the orders to kill, whether a massive
military power or a smaller group that has acquired
weapons, we can all claim our right not to develop,
store, sell or use weapons. We can claim our right not
to kill and not to live with the memory of having
killed. “Declaring eternal hostility” to the fear, greed
and hate which are our real enemies seems to be our true
hope. We can lay aside forever the futility of killing.
We can be hopeful and determined that our resources and
ingenuity are directed toward meeting human needs.
Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org)
co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org)
The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
not necessarily reflect Information Clearing House
editorial policy. |
