Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. Matthew 5:38-39
Chicago is a beautiful city, and majority of the people in Chicago are good people that are tired of this image of violence that is being portrayed nationally of our city. Everyone is quick to try to come up with what they believe to be causing the problems of Chicago Violence. They are blaming guns, drugs, gangs, poverty, rap music and we can go on and on, but none of these are truly the root of the problem because none of these things are the reason why people actually commit murder. They are not looking at the cultural problems that has arisen from what are now multiple generations being born into these circumstances. Now people are accepting these problems as the norm of their environments thus changing a once proud culture. I believe that certain neighborhoods in Chicago has developed a Culture of Honor. Let me explain what a Culture of Honor is by sharing with you an excerpt from the book “Outliers,” by Malcolm Gladwell.
Harlan County was founded in 1819 by eight immigrant families from the northern regions of the British Isles. They had come to Virginia in the eighteenth century and then moved west into the Appalachians in search of land. The county was never wealthy. For its first one hundred years, it was thinly populated, rarely numbering more than ten thousand people. The first settlers kept pigs and herded sheep on the hillsides, scratching out a living on small farms in the valleys. They made whiskey in the backyard stills and felled trees, gloating them down the Cumberland River in the spring, when the water was high. Until well into the twentieth century, getting to the nearest train station was a two-day wagon trip. The only way out of town was up Pine Mountain, which was nine steep miles on a road that turned on occasion into no more than a muddy, rocky trail. Harlan was a remote and strange place, unknown by the larger society around it, and it might well have remained so but for the fact that two of the town’s founding families – the Howards and the Turners – did not get along.
The patriarch of the Howard clan was Samuel Howard. He built the town courthouse and the jail. His counterpart was William Turner, who owned a tavern and two general stores. Once a storm blew down the fence to the Turner property, and a neighbor’s cow wandered onto their land. William Turner’s grandson, “Devil Jim,” shot the cow dead. The neighbor was too terrified to press charges and fled the county. Another time, a man tried to open a competitor to the Turners’ general store. The Turners had a word with him. He closed the store and moved to Indiana. These were not pleasant people.
One night Wix Howard and “Little Bob” Turner – the grandsons of Samuel and William, respectively – played against each other in a game of poker. Each accused the other of cheating. They fought. The following day they met in the street, and after a flurry of gunshots, Little Bob Turner lay dead with a shotgun blast to the chest. A group of Turners went to the Howards’ general store and spoke roughly to Mrs. Howard. She was insulted and told her son Wilse Howard, and the following week he exchanged gunfire with another of the Turners and a friend attacked the Howard home. The two families then clashed outside the Harlan courthouse. In the gunfire, Will Turner was shot and killed. A contingent of Howards then went to see Mrs. Turner, the mother of Will Turner and Little Bob, to ask for a truce. She declined: “You can’t wipe out that blood,” she said pointing to the dirt where her son had died.
Things quickly went from bad to worse. Wilse Howard ran into “Little George” Turner near Sulphur Springs and shot him dead. The Howards ambushed three friends of the Turners – the Cawoods – Killing all of them. A posse was sent out in search of the Howards. In the resulting gunfight, six more were killed or wounded. Wilse Howard heard the Turners were after him, and he and a friend rode into Harlan and attacked the Turner home. Riding back, the Howards were ambushed. In the fighting, another person died. Wilse Howard rode to George Turner’s House and fired at him but missed and killed another man. A posse surrounded the Howard home. There was another gunfight. More dead. The county was in an uproar. I think you get the picture. There were places in the nineteenth-century America where people lived in harmony. Harlan, Kentucky, was not one of them.
“Stop that!” Will Turner’s mother snapped at him when he staggered home, howling in pain after being shot in the courthouse gun battle with the Howards. “Die like a man, like your brother did!” She belonged to a world so well acquainted with fatal gunshots that she had certain expectations about how they ought to be endured. Will shut his mouth and he died. (Gladwell, 162-164)
When one family fights with another, it’s a feud. When lots of families fight with one another in identical little towns up and down the same mountain range, it’s a pattern.What was the cause of the Appalachian pattern? Over the years, many potential explanations have been examined and debated, and the consensus appears to be that that region was plagued by a particularly virulent strain of what sociologists call a “culture of honor.”
Cultures of honor tend to take root in highlands and other marginally fertile areas, such as Sicily or the mountainous Basque regions of Spain. If you live on some rocky mountainside, the explanation goes, you can’t farm. You probably raise goats or sheep, and the kind of culture that grows up around being a herdsman is very different from the culture that grows up around growing crops. The survival of a farmer depends on the cooperation of others in the community. But a herdsman is off by himself. Farmers also don’t have to worry that their livelihood will be stolen in the night, because crops can’t easily be stolen unless, of course, a thief wants to go to the trouble of harvesting an entire field on his own. But a herdsman does have to worry. He’s under constant threat of ruin through the loss of his animals. So he has to be aggressive: he has to make it clear, through his words and deeds, that he is not weak. He has to be willing to fight in response to even the slightest challenge to his reputation and that’s what a “culture of honor” means. It’s a world where a man’s reputation is at the center of his livelihood and self-worth. (Gladwell, 166-167)
In Chicago, there is a certain way that you just have to live. Replace Herdsman with drug dealer because a selected few of the youth in the city “believe” that they don’t have much hope of success unless they choose a life of crime, and you now have the same situation as the herdsman. The corner boys have no choice but protect their reputation. If you, me, and another one of my guys are standing on a corner, and another random person now walks up to me and calls me out my name (bitch) I have to retaliate. I have no choice because you and my friend can now see this as a sign of weakness in me if I just let it go. So if I don’t retaliate you and/or my friend will notice this weakness and now come for my spot. Or even worst, word gets out that I let this go to the neighborhood. Then the next random person that walks up very well could be someone robbing me or worst trying to take over my corner. So yes, I’m going to shoot you, because my retaliation is final, and there is no coming back from that and no one else will challenge me for my spot.
From the moment our boys are born they are told that if someone pushes you, you push them back. This is a fundamental flaw which leads to fights in our youth, and now I will share with you an example of where this can go extremely wrong. Child A bumps into child B this could’ve been a genuine mistake, or it could’ve been on purpose. But now that we’ve instilled this value that we have to push back, Child B pushes Child A back without even thinking about what just happened, child B just reacts. Child A proceeds to beat up child B. Child B goes home and tells his mom that he was beat up by Child A. Mom tells Child B to go back, and fight Child A again and you better win. Well, Child B knows that he got beat up by Child A, and knows this is not going to happen. So Child B grabs a bat, or a brick, or any other weapon he can quickly get his hands on to help even the odds in his mind. As child A and child B get older there is a possibility that this fighting situation doesn’t even get to play out. It can simply go that Child A bumps into Child B, and Child B can just misinterpret the situation and just shoot child A on the spot. Does bumping into someone sound too little of a reason to shoot someone, I just described the Benji Wilson story and that was 28 years ago.
Sad, but I believe that this Culture of Honor is plaguing Chicago. Thus protecting your reputation is ultimate, and we can’t simply forgive a random inappropriate act done against us anymore. The fact that we are not instilling at an early age for our children to just walk away. We instead are teaching our children that walking away would make us punks. Now, this shoot first mentality is born from generations being raised under this fight first ask questions later thought. This thought process has to change, and we have to start raising our children with morals and values at their core instead of raising them with money, sex, and drugs as their core. Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. Matthew 5:38-39
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Chicago Violence – The Elemental Problem
Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. Matthew 5:38-39
Chicago is a beautiful city, and majority of the people in Chicago are good people that are tired of this image of violence that is being portrayed nationally of our city. Everyone is quick to try to come up with what they believe to be causing the problems of Chicago Violence. They are blaming guns, drugs, gangs, poverty, rap music and we can go on and on, but none of these are truly the root of the problem because none of these things are the reason why people actually commit murder. They are not looking at the cultural problems that has arisen from what are now multiple generations being born into these circumstances. Now people are accepting these problems as the norm of their environments thus changing a once proud culture. I believe that certain neighborhoods in Chicago has developed a Culture of Honor. Let me explain what a Culture of Honor is by sharing with you an excerpt from the book “Outliers,” by Malcolm Gladwell.
Harlan County was founded in 1819 by eight immigrant families from the northern regions of the British Isles. They had come to Virginia in the eighteenth century and then moved west into the Appalachians in search of land. The county was never wealthy. For its first one hundred years, it was thinly populated, rarely numbering more than ten thousand people. The first settlers kept pigs and herded sheep on the hillsides, scratching out a living on small farms in the valleys. They made whiskey in the backyard stills and felled trees, gloating them down the Cumberland River in the spring, when the water was high. Until well into the twentieth century, getting to the nearest train station was a two-day wagon trip. The only way out of town was up Pine Mountain, which was nine steep miles on a road that turned on occasion into no more than a muddy, rocky trail. Harlan was a remote and strange place, unknown by the larger society around it, and it might well have remained so but for the fact that two of the town’s founding families – the Howards and the Turners – did not get along.
The patriarch of the Howard clan was Samuel Howard. He built the town courthouse and the jail. His counterpart was William Turner, who owned a tavern and two general stores. Once a storm blew down the fence to the Turner property, and a neighbor’s cow wandered onto their land. William Turner’s grandson, “Devil Jim,” shot the cow dead. The neighbor was too terrified to press charges and fled the county. Another time, a man tried to open a competitor to the Turners’ general store. The Turners had a word with him. He closed the store and moved to Indiana. These were not pleasant people.
One night Wix Howard and “Little Bob” Turner – the grandsons of Samuel and William, respectively – played against each other in a game of poker. Each accused the other of cheating. They fought. The following day they met in the street, and after a flurry of gunshots, Little Bob Turner lay dead with a shotgun blast to the chest. A group of Turners went to the Howards’ general store and spoke roughly to Mrs. Howard. She was insulted and told her son Wilse Howard, and the following week he exchanged gunfire with another of the Turners and a friend attacked the Howard home. The two families then clashed outside the Harlan courthouse. In the gunfire, Will Turner was shot and killed. A contingent of Howards then went to see Mrs. Turner, the mother of Will Turner and Little Bob, to ask for a truce. She declined: “You can’t wipe out that blood,” she said pointing to the dirt where her son had died.
Things quickly went from bad to worse. Wilse Howard ran into “Little George” Turner near Sulphur Springs and shot him dead. The Howards ambushed three friends of the Turners – the Cawoods – Killing all of them. A posse was sent out in search of the Howards. In the resulting gunfight, six more were killed or wounded. Wilse Howard heard the Turners were after him, and he and a friend rode into Harlan and attacked the Turner home. Riding back, the Howards were ambushed. In the fighting, another person died. Wilse Howard rode to George Turner’s House and fired at him but missed and killed another man. A posse surrounded the Howard home. There was another gunfight. More dead. The county was in an uproar. I think you get the picture. There were places in the nineteenth-century America where people lived in harmony. Harlan, Kentucky, was not one of them.
“Stop that!” Will Turner’s mother snapped at him when he staggered home, howling in pain after being shot in the courthouse gun battle with the Howards. “Die like a man, like your brother did!” She belonged to a world so well acquainted with fatal gunshots that she had certain expectations about how they ought to be endured. Will shut his mouth and he died. (Gladwell, 162-164)
When one family fights with another, it’s a feud. When lots of families fight with one another in identical little towns up and down the same mountain range, it’s a pattern.What was the cause of the Appalachian pattern? Over the years, many potential explanations have been examined and debated, and the consensus appears to be that that region was plagued by a particularly virulent strain of what sociologists call a “culture of honor.”
Cultures of honor tend to take root in highlands and other marginally fertile areas, such as Sicily or the mountainous Basque regions of Spain. If you live on some rocky mountainside, the explanation goes, you can’t farm. You probably raise goats or sheep, and the kind of culture that grows up around being a herdsman is very different from the culture that grows up around growing crops. The survival of a farmer depends on the cooperation of others in the community. But a herdsman is off by himself. Farmers also don’t have to worry that their livelihood will be stolen in the night, because crops can’t easily be stolen unless, of course, a thief wants to go to the trouble of harvesting an entire field on his own. But a herdsman does have to worry. He’s under constant threat of ruin through the loss of his animals. So he has to be aggressive: he has to make it clear, through his words and deeds, that he is not weak. He has to be willing to fight in response to even the slightest challenge to his reputation and that’s what a “culture of honor” means. It’s a world where a man’s reputation is at the center of his livelihood and self-worth. (Gladwell, 166-167)
In Chicago, there is a certain way that you just have to live. Replace Herdsman with drug dealer because a selected few of the youth in the city “believe” that they don’t have much hope of success unless they choose a life of crime, and you now have the same situation as the herdsman. The corner boys have no choice but protect their reputation. If you, me, and another one of my guys are standing on a corner, and another random person now walks up to me and calls me out my name (bitch) I have to retaliate. I have no choice because you and my friend can now see this as a sign of weakness in me if I just let it go. So if I don’t retaliate you and/or my friend will notice this weakness and now come for my spot. Or even worst, word gets out that I let this go to the neighborhood. Then the next random person that walks up very well could be someone robbing me or worst trying to take over my corner. So yes, I’m going to shoot you, because my retaliation is final, and there is no coming back from that and no one else will challenge me for my spot.
From the moment our boys are born they are told that if someone pushes you, you push them back. This is a fundamental flaw which leads to fights in our youth, and now I will share with you an example of where this can go extremely wrong. Child A bumps into child B this could’ve been a genuine mistake, or it could’ve been on purpose. But now that we’ve instilled this value that we have to push back, Child B pushes Child A back without even thinking about what just happened, child B just reacts. Child A proceeds to beat up child B. Child B goes home and tells his mom that he was beat up by Child A. Mom tells Child B to go back, and fight Child A again and you better win. Well, Child B knows that he got beat up by Child A, and knows this is not going to happen. So Child B grabs a bat, or a brick, or any other weapon he can quickly get his hands on to help even the odds in his mind. As child A and child B get older there is a possibility that this fighting situation doesn’t even get to play out. It can simply go that Child A bumps into Child B, and Child B can just misinterpret the situation and just shoot child A on the spot. Does bumping into someone sound too little of a reason to shoot someone, I just described the Benji Wilson story and that was 28 years ago.
Sad, but I believe that this Culture of Honor is plaguing Chicago. Thus protecting your reputation is ultimate, and we can’t simply forgive a random inappropriate act done against us anymore. The fact that we are not instilling at an early age for our children to just walk away. We instead are teaching our children that walking away would make us punks. Now, this shoot first mentality is born from generations being raised under this fight first ask questions later thought. This thought process has to change, and we have to start raising our children with morals and values at their core instead of raising them with money, sex, and drugs as their core. Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. Matthew 5:38-39
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