Feeling the Pain

"600 Words" by Esther J Cepeda

If you live in Chicago, or any other world-class city like New York or LA, you have a unique civic pride, a knowing that wherever your travels may take you – the South Pole, New Guinea, or Beijing – anyone you bump into will know where you’re from.

Rarely do you encounter someone in Guam who will respond to “I’m from Chicago” with “Oh, isn’t that where the schoolchildren get killed on their way to school?”

That doesn’t make it any less true.

The harsh reality is that thirty-four Chicago Public School children died violently in 2007, at least that many are gone so far this year, and we haven’t even begun to imagine how many more will be claimed by New Year’s eve.

The million dollar question is what to do about it. Everything has been put on the table: SWAT teams have been deployed, gun laws proposed, anti-violence curriculum put in schools, even trained ex-gang members have trickled into the streets to help “mediate” turf battles. But no silver bullet, if you’ll pardon the pun, has put a dent in the tensions roiling neighborhoods all over Chicago.

The politicians and the church leaders have had their say about what it will take to end the carnage. Look at “Letters to the Editor” pages in Chicago you’ll see the general public weighing in, mostly heaping blame on “careless parents.” They’ve all got good points, we’ve heard them all before.

Since innovative solutions are in order, I thought I’d ask for one from a different kind of expert. I called up Marco Marsen, aka the “Billion Dollar Problem Solver,” a marketing wiz for the likes of myriad successful corporations, “one of America’s top Out-of-the-Box thinkers,” and author of “Why We Haven't Won the Wars on Poverty, Drugs or Terror" to get a different take on things.

Now don’t get too excited, he didn’t have “an answer,” but did throw out the beginning of one. It goes a little something like this: we need to start caring.

“We’re all in this together,” he told me recently, while on tour for his new book The Lion’s Way. “But the people who live in poverty, the people who don’t have health care and have to choose between getting a tooth treated and paying the rent – they’ve been forgotten.”

“Whether you like it or not, the people who are pulling the triggers are the victims of all the failings of us as a society,” he says, “The feeling of ‘I don’t have any choices so I’m going to take matters into my own hands’ is what’s driving this.”

Marco thinks we Americans – who claim to live in the greatest country in the world –

consider those who lash out in our inequitable society a problem we have no part or responsibility in.

And he’s right. How many of us have thought: “‘I’m’ never part of the problem, so ‘I’ can never be part of the solution.”

We’re all worried about our wallets and the economy, but not overly concerned about who dies in the “bad parts of the city.” Its human nature: the gas tank bill is in your face, while dead children on the 6 o’clock news is sad, but doesn’t affect your life past the sound-byte. Unless you live in those “bad parts” of the city, that is.

The actual impact of what happens in those “bad parts” affects us as members of our society in immeasurable ways – spiritual, emotional, economic – that message just hasn’t hit home yet.

“I don’t blame people – why would anyone want to feel the pain?” Marco says, “But at the end of the day, we’re all in this together.”

From the Billion Dollar Problem Solver: not an “answer,” just the beginning of one: we need to start feeling the pain.

Esther J. Cepeda writes the “600 Words” & “Pregunta del Dia” columns, and is also a Director at the Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization. Her reporting and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of UNO. “600 words” is a registered trademark of EeJayCee, Inc., Copyright 2008. May be reprinted with permission, contact eejaycee@600words.com

Comments

[Michael Hunt]

Right on, Esther!

I have a tendency to only comment on your columns when I think you're way off base, but this time I must heap a little praise.

Various programs and solutions to these problems have been proposed, but this is the most honest reason I've seen put forth regarding the root cause of the problem: We don't care. And we don't care because we all have our own problems to deal with and precious little time or energy or ruminate over something that doesn't touch us directly.

Of course the solutions are known. Resurrecting and investing in programs that worked to begin with would be a start. Head Start, anyone? Boys & Girls Clubs? Music and art courses in our schools? These are just a tiny portion of what has worked and been systematically dismantled over the past twenty to thirty years. The infrastructure that has protected the people in our society most at risk is being destroyed by neglect and avarice, and not a little unadulterated evil.

You questioned in a recent column the effectiveness of the immigration march on the first of this month. How effective would it be if this city was shut down be demonstrations every time one of these children were put to rest?

[Lois]

"Caring" takes many forms. One is to cut the kids some slack. If they're shooting hoops in their back yard and the ball hops over the fence to your yard, don't make a big deal of it. I applaud the parents who put up the hoop so their kids and their friends have an outlet for all their energy.

[John]

This issue is like a lot of other things in society, if you aren't part of the solution, then like it or not, you are part of the problem!