New Year

It's not really news, per se, but it's--nice isn't really the word--good to see it getting national coverage. Do I think this will change anything? I'm not sure, but I doubt it. Do I want to become the next David Simon? Not really--I don't think I have the constitution for prolonged bouts of anger--but when I see stuff like this (not news to me, but presented like this, off the pages of the middlebrow Chicago Tribune, in a new context) I feel that outraged, liberal, Ivy League, white person frustration coming on, and that's difficult enough to parse on its own. Usually it just turns into sadness, which is far less productive, albeit certainly less hypocritical.

 There are times when I feel ashamed of loving the things I love about Chicago as much as I do, because I know I enjoy them others' expense. (And that feeling, too, is an unwanted luxury.) Once you know something, you can't un-know it. When I hopped in the airport shuttle in Kansas City two days ago, told the driver where I was from, and he said, "Oh, Chicago. That's a great city. Big homicide problem, though," it reminded me of the reactions French people would have when we told them we were from Illinois, "near Chicago." They would inevitably mime a machine gun, and make the machine gun noise. They had gotten their image of Chicago from Al Capone, but were they really that far off base? Certainly not in the nineties, which was when most of those conversations took place. There are fewer homicides now in Chicago than there were then, even with this year's 16% rise, but that is no reason to feel good about ourselves, or the city. To echo President Obama recently, is this really the best we can do?

Kansas City has its own sizable homicide rate, so the guy driving the shuttle would know. To someone from New Orleans or Detroit or Baltimore if we're talking per capita, I probably sound quaint too. But competing for the distinction of Worst National Murder Problem is about as stupid as undergraduates comparing how little sleep they got the night before.

Why am I starting a new year of blogging by talking about this? No particular reason, aside from the fact that it's something I've been thinking about and I don't want it to go unsaid. On a personal level, I don't know whether 2013 will be better or worse than 2012 (odds are it'll be better, although I don't want to tempt fate), but if I learn anywhere near as much this year as I did last year, it'll certainly be a doozy.