Missing The Forest For The Trees

This past July 4 weekend, the city of Chicago saw a staggering seventy-two shootings. However, very few people were talking about this violence. The nation continued to focus on George Zimmerman’s trial, Ariel Castro’s abductions, and Aaron Hernandez’s possible murder charges.

Now part of this is the troubling national attitude that “Well, that’s just Chicago,” which shows a dismissive, apathetic attitude that is a problem in and of itself. However, George Zimmerman, Ariel Castro, and Aaron Hernandez: these are all names, they all have faces, and people have all read their background. You can focus on a linear (if not transparent) story line and attribute a single cause-and-effect outcome to them. The concept of “seventy-two shootings” just becomes a statistic, not a collection of stories about people with lives just as complicated, just as real as the faces we see on the television. For many, the number just loses its meaning and becomes a less tangible problem than the straightforward, “ Single Person A harmed Single/Multiple Person(s) B, and we have to figure out how to react and respond.”