On Juneteenth, dozens of people
were shot in Chicago and several ended up dying.
It happened during a celebration, a day that was
supposed to be about freedom, community, family, and progress. By the next
morning, people had already moved on to the next headline.
As a father and as a Chicago guy, I struggle with that.
Not because I think one tragedy should receive
more attention than another, but because I think we have developed a habit of
ranking our grief. Some victims seem to receive endless coverage while others
disappear into a statistic before the blood is dry on the pavement.
A shooting at a grade school is horrifying. A shooting at a shopping
mall is horrifying. A shooting at a church, a concert, a movie theater, or a
parade is horrifying.
So is a shooting at a neighborhood celebration on the South Side of
Chicago. The pain does not become smaller because of the ZIP code.
A mother is waiting for a child to come home, it doesn’t matter whether
she lives in Beverly, Englewood, Bridgeport, Austin, Oak Park, or Naperville.
The fear is the same. The phone call is the same. The grief is the same. The
empty chair at the dinner table is the same.
As Chicagoans, we sometimes develop a strange relationship with
violence. We hear about another shooting and simply shrug our shoulders. We
tell ourselves that it happened in a rough neighborhood. We tell ourselves that
there were probably circumstances we do not understand. We tell ourselves that
it is sad, but it is normal.
That might be the most
dangerous thing of all.
When violence becomes normal, we stop seeing the people involved. We
stop seeing sons and daughters. We stop seeing fathers and mothers. We stop
seeing dreams that will never be fulfilled and conversations that will never
happen. We start seeing numbers. Thirty-five shot, five killed. Those are just
numbers printed out on the front of the Sum Times.
Unfortunately, every one of those numbers had a name. Every one of those
names belongs to a family. Every one of those families will remember Juneteenth
for the rest of their lives for reasons that have nothing to do with
celebration. Juneteenth of 2026 became a death anniversary for five families.
I am not interested in chalking this into a political argument. There
are plenty of people who get paid to argue about politics. I am interested in
reminding people that human suffering should not be ignored because it happens
too often.
If anything, repeated violence should
demand more of our attention, not less.
Chicago is one of the greatest cities in the world. It is a city of
neighborhoods, churches, parks, taverns, corner stores, hot dog stands,
softball fields, block parties, and families trying to build a good life. Most
people get up every morning, go to work, pay their bills, raise their kids, and
hope for something better tomorrow.
Those people deserve peace.
Those children deserve peace.
Those parents deserve peace.
… and the victims deserve to be
remembered as more than a statistic buried beneath the next news cycle. A
tragedy does not have to happen in our neighborhood for us to care about it. It
only has to happen to another human being, another Chicagoan.
That
should be enough for someone to stand up and figure out what needs to be done.
I am tired of
turning on channel nine news and hearing that there was a mass shooting over
the weekend and quickly talk about a traffic jam on the Kennedy and what movie
Dean Richards viewed over the weekend.
