Murder is routine in the city of Chicago, which experienced over 500 homicides last year (the number ranges from 506 to 516, depending on your source). It's so routine that the city became a sort of far-off black cloud lingering in the background of the year's massacres in Aurora and Newtown, a reminder — if you remembered — that gun violence takes lives in grotesque numbers every single day.
Last June, Urooj Khan, a 46-year-old who owned several dry cleaners in Chicago, won a cool million in the Illinois lottery. He reacted in an appropriate enough way, yelling "I hit a million, I hit a million!" repeatedly before leaving the 7-Eleven, only to return after a few moments to tip the store's clerk $100. Several weeks later, at a ceremony where he was presented with an oversized check, Khan said "Winning the lottery means everything to me." Khan added he had plans to donate some of the post-taxes sum of $425,000 to a local children's hospital and then invest the remaining cash into his business.
Everyone has a subway horror story. In addition to the day-to-day awfulness of crowded rush hour commutes, there are occasional subway parties, flashers, seats filled with mysterious liquids and, sometimes, there's even poo on the floor. But all of that pales in comparison to life on Chicago's Blue Line, where the poo doesn't just harmlessly lie on the floor; instead, as a young Chicago woman recently discovered, it's flung at innocent passengers while inside of a sock.
The Philadelphia 76ers are a mediocre NBA team, but don't mention that to anyone on the El there because there's a chance you may get shot. After last night's game between the Chicago Bulls and the Sixers — which was won by Chicago — fans of the teams got into an argument on the El, presumably over which team is slightly better and thus will lose to the Miami Heat in the playoffs this year.
The void in Congress left by Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., who resigned last month after spending the second half of 2012 bouncing in and out of mental institutions and bars, is vast. And the bar is high for a candidate to meet the expectations of Chicago voters, who resoundingly re-elected Jackson less than four weeks ago even though he had disappeared without a word for five months and was under federal investigation for campaign finance violations. Luckily for Chicagoans, convicted sex offender and former congressman Mel Reynolds is bravely stepping into the breach.
Chicago police discovered roughly $10 million worth of pot growing in a field on Chicago's South Side. The plants, some of which were ten feet tall, took up a plot of land the size of two football fields. Even with so much weed, authorities only found the field during a routine helicopter patrol, and even that was mostly due to luck, according to Cook County Sherriff's officer Ed Graney.
Chief Keef's entrée into hip-hop earlier this year was a quick and unusual one. At 16, Keef had made a small name for himself on Chicago's south side with a handful of enthusiastic but poorly produced rap videos, the most promising of which was "I Don't Like." As its name portends, "I Don't Like" is a musical rundown of the things that chap Keef's hide, including bitch niggas, snitch niggas, and fake shoes. The video he recorded to accompany the song depicts him and his friends smoking a lot of weed, passing around a handgun, and dancing around his grandmother's house shirtless.
The ongoing (but maybe soon to end?) teachers' strike in Chicago is being viewed by many as an early skirmish in a coming war over the crisis in public education—stagnant or declining graduation rates, substandard educations, dilapidated schools, angry teachers, underserved students. There is one simple step that would go a long way toward resolving many of those issues: Make all schools public schools.
That back-to-school chill is in the air, except in Chicago, where 26,000 public school teachers and support staff are on strike and more than 350,000 students are just fucking off all day instead of learning. Even though Chicago is a dull provincial city of little national import, everybody is talking about the strike because Rahm Emanuel is mayor and Obama used to live there. What's the story?
Two months before alleged killer James Holmes stormed a Colorado movie theater, murdering 12 and injuring dozens more, police and politicians in a different place were trying to squelch the tremors from their own mass killing. It was in Chicago, over Memorial Day weekend, when police responded to more than 40 shooting victims in about 72 hours. Ten of those victims were shot dead, including four teenage children. Alas, despite the fact that more people died that weekend than in both the August 5 Sikh killings and yesterday's College Station shootings combined, there will be no flags at half-staff for those 10 Chicagoans. It's likely you didn't even know those people were dead, just like most of your friends and family. In a summer of now three much-lamented shootings with multiple victims, Chicago's murdered are the forgotten ones.
