Miles To Go
Steve from the Argus was last to leave. The last of the media, that is. The discussion at Joe’s Barbershop would end with everyone holding hands in prayer, but the media was long gone by then. The television cameras got their video bites early and left to make the 9:00 / 10:00 news. The QCTimes left after ninety minutes. Whether operating on deadline or just saving money is hard to tell, but showing up to chronicle problems and leaving before holding hands in resolution of solutions skews how people who weren’t at the meeting will understand it.
The media wasn’t supposed to be there, but how could they resist? It’s 269 miles from Davenport to Ferguson, and if stretched budgets and media ADD can’t keep local reporters at one local meeting for its entirety, there’s little chance they could make it to Ferguson for on-scene reporting. So the media will report part of what they saw, and recycle it through as many video segments and letters to the editor as they can. I don’t begrudge the recycling so much as the inattention.
An incisive piece of reporting, a dramatic video bite or an evocative picture all deserve some recycling. But reporting on communities who step up to confront racism while ignoring others who fail to address it is a concern. It is the ignoring of problems that does us in.
Here’s what I saw and heard at Joe’s. Concern, and goodwill. Concern for talking past each other, looking past each other, and not understanding each other. Concern for a dream not yet achieved by all, and fading for some; particularly our youth. The walls at Joe’s are nearly sagging from the dream achieved by many. There is hardly a free spot left for the next picture of a Davenport kid done good, smiling with a new title, championship or degree. It’s heartwarming, but many of the news clippings are yellowing with time.
It’s 17.8 miles from the three-flat I grew up in to the Cook County Courthouse at 26th and California in Chicago. Nightmares, rather than dreams, occupy prosecutors at courthouses across the nation, and 26th and California churns them out with regularity. I once served on a first-degree murder jury that haunts me still. A teenager ... a boy really (the gun did not make him a man) was defending market share in the local economy ... drugs. He walked up to another teenager in a car that was intruding on that turf and murdered him. How could we be sure of that? Well, the guy in the passenger seat lived through a few bullets and positively (and using language far too direct for our filters) identified him, in front of all of us on the jury.
There were other eyewitnesses, and good detective work, and the thud of deformed lead on the prosecutor’s desk to convince us too. The deliberations lasted not more than five minutes. The boy (by then a jail-hardened young man) was found guilty, and will be serving time for years to come. Afterwards, we were told he was already serving other sentences and really only went to trial to break the monotony of his days in prison.
The thud of the bullets on the prosecutor’s desk is memorable. The animated and profane witness stand certainty of the passenger who lived won’t ever be forgotten. But what I was most struck by was how that kid was just doing what he was supposed to. Not in any legal or moral sense, of course. But in the completely haywire world in which he lived, he was doing the same thing we all do when we go to work. Finding his way, doing his job, trying to impress his supervisors and move up a notch in the organizational chart. That street corner was his office, that gun was work-issued, and those trigger pulls were his way to make his mark. Completely insane to us, and completely normal to him.
The goodwill at Joe’s is omnipresent. There are more than fifty people packed in and not one person says something that is hurtful, or disrespectful, or mean-spirited. Everyone wants to help make the community stronger, more equitable, more inclusive, and more caring. Who knows how the media cameras will characterize it, but everyone who stays is committed to the dream, and signs up to help achieve it.
It’s 5.7 miles from Joe’s to the iWireless Center, and just one weekend apart from the Regional Vision Summit on Friday morning. In Room A (naming rights still available) hundreds of corporateers devised ground rules for moving the vision forward. One hopes the “cool, creative and prosperous” vision includes the dream which everyone at Joe’s is trying to make real.
