Saturday night saw a “teen takeover” of downtown Chicago, organized on social media. Gang members burned cars, brawled, jumped on top of cars, and broke the barricades of outnumbered police on Michigan Avenue and in the area of Millenium Park. Two kids were shot; thank God, they both are going to be OK.
Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson, a “progressive” Democrat who narrowly defeated moderate Paul Vallas a few weeks ago, wasted no time in saying, “In no way do I condone the destructive activity we saw in the Loop and on the Lakefront this weekend.”
Fine. But he didn’t stop there. “However,” he continued, “it is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been deprived of opportunities in their own communities.”
Really? Not even when they attack policemen, commit violence against others, and burn $120,000 Teslas? Not even when they disrupt the bus lines and shoot each other? It goes without saying that kids should not be demonized because they have been deprived of opportunities. But does that give them carte blanche to commit mayhem? Why did Chicago’s new mayor find it necessary to qualify his condemnation of the inexcusable?
Brandon Johnson is an extremist. That’s one reason why I was pulling for Vallas in the mayoral runoff. The new mayor went on to talk about the social and recreational opportunities he wanted to create for such kids, and that’s well and good. But why did he feel it necessary to water down his condemnation of this weekend’s violence by giving those involved an excuse? These are two different issues. Granted, they are not unrelated. But in no way, shape, or form does the lack of recreational and social opportunities for inner-city youth change the fact that what happened in downtown Chicago this past weekend was inexcusable. Period.
Why couldn’t the mayor-elect simply condemn it out of hand, and talk about programs to remedy the causes later? I admit that I haven’t studied Johnson’s program in detail, but at least thus far I haven’t heard him propose anything outrageous. Maybe I’m wrong. But as far as I know, my problems with the guy don’t fall into the area of policy. They have to do with what seems to be an inability to say that what happened was inexcusable without immediately appearing to justify it. Whatever the causes of the violence in downtown Chicago Saturday night, society didn’t commit it. The kids who committed it committed it, and one would have hoped that the city’s new mayor could have done better than to condemn the violence and then immediately start making excuses for it, however valid the connection between the lack of opportunities these kids had for more constructive activity and what they actually did.
Of course, the incoming mayor has an excuse: practically everybody is an extremist these days. I doubt that many law-and-order types would have been at all concerned about the underlying social causes of the rioting, either. But while the second doesn’t mitigate the responsibility of those involved for their behavior, the two are not unrelated. There will be a time for addressing those. I simply wonder whether the immediate aftermath of the violence was the time for that.
I would have felt better about the way the new mayor of the city in which I was born treated the situation if he had simply and unequivocally called these kids out for what they did Saturday night, and let it go it that- and then undertaken a comprehensive program for addressing the reasons why those kids were gathered downtown Saturday night. Can Mayor-elect Johnson really wonder why so many Chicagoans were uneasy about his becoming mayor when he can’t unequivocally condemn outrageous behavior by minority youth without making excuses for it? Can he really not see the double message he sent with his statement, not only to the rioters but to the frightened people who voted for Paul Vallas in the runoff?
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