Thursday, August 3, 2023
In bed at 10:40, awake at 5:15, with sharp back pains, moved to BR recliner, dozed till 6:12. Let Lilly out, 67℉, sunny but clouds moving in, high of 85℉, AQI=49, Good. Wind W at 6, 4-7/15 mph. Dps today 63 - 68 😩. The sun rose at 5:45, sets at 8:11, 14+27.
Dystopia. There is a news story in this morning's JSOnline about an 18-year-old Black youth who will be sentenced today for his raping and beating to death a 36-year-old Hmong woman in Washington Park 3 years ago when he was 15 years old. She was on her way home from an Asian grocery store. He was part of a gang of 6 Black kids on bikes who harassed her and chased her toward the park's lagoon where the 15-year-old and a 17-year-old companion raped and beat her so badly she died 3 days later. As I read the story, I was shocked that I was unaware of this vicious crime only 3 years ago. How could I not have known of this, or if I knew of it, how could I have forgotten it? In any event, it reminded me of similar crimes in the Inner City when I was managing the House of Peace, crimes about which I wrote to our donors in one of my quarterly Dove Notes:
"Advent, 2002. Dear Friends,
Some letters are hard to write. This is one of them. At about 11:00 p.m. on Sunday, September 28th, just a few blocks from the House of Peace, a mob of 15, mostly kids, beat to death a 36-year-old man named Charles Young. It started when a 10-year-old threw an egg at Mr. Young. When Mr. Young gave chase, a 14-year-old intervened. Mr. Young threw a punch at the 14-year-old, hitting him in the mouth and breaking his tooth. Precisely what occurred is hard to discern. As is almost always the case, accounts vary. Eventually, however, a mob assembled, tracked down Mr. Young, pursued him into and dragged him out of a house, and beat him senseless on the front porch. The assailants used sticks, tree branches, a shovel handle, a rake, a 2 by 4, a milk carton - apparently whatever was handy and potentially injurious. The injuries were horrific. Mr. Young died two days later. Twelve of the 15 people charged with the crime are 17 years old or younger, including the 19-year-old who threw the egg. The 10-year-old is in children's court; the others have been charged as adults.
At about 11:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 30th, a group of two teenagers and 3 young men raped a 42-year-old woman from our neighborhood in an alley a few blocks from the House of Peace. Unlike the crime against Mr. Young, which was marked by some small measure of [unexculpatory] spontaneity and passion, this assault was entirely premeditated and predatory. The hunters came into the area looking for a prostitute to gang-rape. When they found no prostitute, they seized upon our neighbor who was walking home from a convenience store. They disrobed (a euphemism) and assaulted (another euphemism) her in an alley for 45 minutes until interrupted and arrested by police. Those arrested were 14, 16, 18, 22, and 25 years old. They are charged with kidnapping and 1st-degree sexual assault. Prosecutors are seeking to try the 14 and 16-year-olds as adults.
. . . . . .
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. How is it possible for us not to believe that we live in a very, very sick society, truly a dystopia? And these were crimes committed without guns! Add in all the gun violence. Add in all the horrors of living in a consumer society, haunted daily by exhortations to buy this, buy that in order to be happy, satisfied, and fulfilled. A society where professionals work constantly on influencing our thinking, our judgments, our desires, the "hidden persuaders." And a society in which Donald J. Trump runs even with Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential election campaign. B. Yeats, The Stolen Child: Come away, O human child, to the waters and the wild, with a fairy, hand in hand, for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Anniversary. From my memoir: "My parents married at St. Bernard’s Church on August 3, 1940. My mother was 18 and my father a month shy of his 20th birthday. They were practicing Catholics and they were virgins. They were not only virgins; my father had never “touched” my mother, a fact he shared with Geri during one of their long intimate conversations. If Charles and Mary were to embrace and physically love each other, according to the laws of the Church, they would have to be married and married they became, still teenagers, only a few years beyond childhood, unable to conceive of the challenges, the extraordinary hardships they were to experience in the years ahead of them. They married as German troops were sipping good French wine in recently occupied Paris, as the first Jewish and Gypsy prisoners were being sent to Auschwitz, and as Japan was occupying coastal cities in China and in French Indochina, now Vietnam. The threatening international picture isn’t reflected in their wedding photographs, and indeed they were oblivious to it, as my father confirmed in his 80s when I asked him about it. He didn’t say it but we know the truth: they wanted to fall asleep next to each other at night and to wake up next to each other in their mornings, to make love to each other when the Spirit moved, to face life together, to draw strength from each other, to be supported by the love of each other, all without facing the eternal hell fires threatened by the Church. And so they got married in their youth, their adolescence.
The wedding was formal, with my mother in a beautiful bridal gown and formal dresses on her bridesmaids and tuxedos for my father and his attendants. Where in the world did they get the money to fund the wedding? My father’s tuxedo was rented, I’m sure, and my mother’s dress, I’m sure, was borrowed. The wedding reception was in an apartment or a rented room, perhaps theirs for the term of the rental, They were married in any event by their favorite parish priest, Father William Cousins, who later became Archbishop Cousins of Milwaukee, the eponym of “The Cousins Center,” which would be sold to cover some of the costs of the sins of the Church that drove my parents, at such a young age, to marry, to commit themselves under pain of eternal damnation to staying together no matter what.
After the marriage, Chuck and Mary Clausen lived in very modest circumstances, i.e., a succession of furnished rooms with Murphy beds, which is to say, their home consisted of a single room with a fold-up bed built into one of the walls. They took a room on the north side of Chicago once, for reasons never explained to me by my Dad, but felt out of place there and quickly moved back to the South Side, in or near Englewood. When they ‘scouted out’ rooms to rent, my mother could tell as soon as she entered a room whether it was infested by bedbugs; they had a special smell and she was sensitive to it, undoubtedly from living with bedbugs during her young life. My mother’s sensitive nose, however, did not work with cockroaches, at least of the Oriental type, for the three small rooms at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue that we lived in for the first twelve or thirteen years of my life were always infested with those large black shiny cockroaches that cracked when we were rarely able to step on them and that we euphemistically called “water bugs.” We lived with them for years."
Trump was arraigned today. No comment.
First stab at an homage to Jean-Michel Basquiat
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