The (O) Ring
By Eastan McNeal on October 1, 2009 at 6:01 PM in Current Affairs
You can’t kill me! I’m just a kid!
Have you ever heard a gunshot ring throughout a neighborhood street? Have you ever heard church bells ring in the mourning of a soul who was lost by that bullet? Has anything ever rung true to you that you assume most people don’t get?
16-year-old boy beaten to death in Chicago. This makes my heart ring low down to my knees. It keeps happening there. Something is wrong.
Baghdad, Belfast and Beirut sound like scary places. The inner city in America is even more troublesome to me than these places because one never knows the enemy is the enemy. I lived for a while in the Chicago area. Gangs were recruiting younger and younger members and, without “proper gang-military training” (yes – I read that phrase in a Chicago paper?!), some of their shots went into unintended windows.
One day a child was killed in his living room by a random bullet that was fired, from the street, at the Cabrini Green apartments. I’ll call him ‘Pattie.’ He was a good kid. Not a gang member. He is dead. Later in that same year an infant was killed in her baby swing by a bullet fired in the general direction of the building. We seem to have become distracted from, not focused on our own back yards, and we seemed to have stopped putting the feet of the political leaders (that we have on our payroll) to the fire.
Maybe Hometown Security is simply: not having Beirut in our Bedrooms. There is an enemy in America – and it is us. The best way I can see to fight it is to be good to everyone and set an example. I have more to say, but not the time to organize a message that will actually do any good, except:
My statement is this: Take care of the kids. Here is the song, published with permission from the author:
THE RING
Once upon a winter on the Southside Frankie made a snowman in the road Patty’s mother wouldn’t let him outside Recently the gangs had lost control |
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Chorus: The Ring |
Kids were being shot at in the playground Drugs were being peddled in the halls Patty kept a double lock and heard sounds On the balcony outside his window walls Frankie came to Patty’s on Sundays |
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The Ring The Ring Can you hear it ring The guns The guns They are echoing |
Now Frankie is a copper on the West Side Guarding all the Patty’s from the ring But how do you stop a bullet from the outside How do you protect the Patties from the ring? |
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The Ring. The ring. Can you hear them ring? The guns. The guns are echoing. The ring. The ring. Can you hear them ring? The bells. The bells.. Can you hear them ring? |
Chicago continues to break all world records for youth on youth death by violence, excluding war zones. I dream of a day that we can find a way to understand why this happens and how we can stop it, without being an incarceration nation.
Solutions? Anyone?
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Does the Olympics want to be in Chicago with their check books open? I truly want to hear a solution to this problem that has driven me to move even deeper into the woods, away from areas that cops are ordered to protect shop windows and not kids’ lives.
This is not an Obama problem. This is not a Bush or Clinton problem. This is a problem. I had forgotten how much, as a Chicago suburbanite, that I feared parts (sides) of Chicago. I really started worrying again about it when Obama wanted to bring innocent young Olympic kids to one of the most violent cities in the world, Chicago. Since my worry can’t change what will happen in the Olympic selection process, at least I can say that I went on record in stating that Chicago should get their own act together before they invite the world to play in their Soldier Field.
After drafting this post a friend made a private comment that I think should kick off the discussion.
You wrote in your post it isn’t Obama’s fault – but I think this is partly the fault of Obama and all his cronies. All those decrepit buildings and areas… not doing more to control the crime…. AIG
Yes. We seem to forget that Obama represented the South Side of Chicago after he cheated his way into the state senate. His number one fund-raiser, the convicted felon Tony Rezko, got favors through Obama to help Rezko become the most insensitive slumlord in modern history. In turn Obama got a sweet deal on his first mansion with Rezko’s help. I guess a state senator who thought about his poor constituents between his long bouts of self-adulation would have worked on Tony to educate him on the benefits of providing a better environment to raise families. But I never saw evidence of Barry telling Tony to straighten up or I am going to quit taking your money. Nope. I probably missed that press conference and subsequent speech on why it is America’s problem that we don’t understand that ghetto people are like hillbillies. We don’t really need them to follow Bill Ayers’ plan for america. Let them eat yellow cake.
by Ronald Scott
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