Holy Toledo?

Perhaps the best and worst feature of photography is its ability to suspend time. To forever freeze a moment. A personal favorite is the exuberant sailor who spontaneously grabbed a nurse in Manhattan on V-J Day and kissed her deeply.

The unbridled joy of war ending never had a better expression.

Not so joyous is the image of a young man, caught in the glare of police lights and suddenly appearing as a vulnerable child just moments before he was shot to death.

In the face of a hysterically over-reactive population, this tiny moment, just milliseconds long, will act as permanent condemnation of the Chicago Police Department and the officer who shot him.

Some background: Chicago police, reacting to gunfire in the city's Little Village neighborhood, came upon Adam Toledo and twenty-one year-old Ruben Roman, fresh from firing their gun at cars.

As gang-bangers are wont to do, Adam had custody of the gun since he is—in the eyes of the law—a child. A foot chase ensued. As one officer closed in on Adam, he was told to drop the gun and put his hands up.

It's critical to note the officer was over his left shoulder.

At a gap in a high wooden fence, Adam, holding the gun in his right hand, made a barely discernible underhand toss of the gun on the side of the fence not visible to the officer. Even in slow motion the action is hardly visible—never mind at a full-tilt sprint down a shadowy alleyway at two-thirty in the morning.

Having relieved himself of the gun, Adam begins to turn towards the officer, simultaneously raising his hands.

It was while doing this that he was shot.

If you're a member of the portion of society that acknowledges reality, it's completely likely that given the angles at hand, the pursuing officer never saw Adam dispose of the gun. With his last bit of visual data being that Adam had a gun, his turning toward the officer could only be construed one way.

If it is true with us, it is doubly true of officers in the pressure-cooker of a pursuit that we are rarely afforded the luxury of a slow motion replay before we make critical decisions. The officer didn't wantonly assassinate Adam Toledo. He was reacting to a lethal and immediate threat.

With canonization seeming set for this week, popular opinion sides overwhelmingly with Adam and his aged-based innocence. Mentions of his age far outweigh recitations of the fact that just minutes earlier he was randomly shooting at cars and was in possession of the gun.

Also lost is the fact that Adam decided to run, thereby initiating the chase and had disposed of the gun in as secretive a manner as he could manage.

Ask yourself: how would this story be different had Adam tossed the gun on the side of the fence visible to the police officer? It was a light-colored fence and the airborne gun would have been clearly-visible against it.

But Adam didn't. He was thinking like a gang-banger and sought to hide the evidence.

Also keep in mind this sequence played out in real time, not slow motion. Over a period of—perhaps—two seconds. It was a perfect storm of circumstance.

But before we re-name everything in Toledo's memory and declare March 29^th a national day of remembrance, I hope we give a few seconds to the realization that Toledo and Toledo alone set these events in motion when he decided to hang with Ruben Roman.

Once and for all it was a pitiable decision by a boy who had no business making it. But he's hardly the first person to die as a result of a bad decision. And he won't be the last.

Heartless? Maybe.

But I reserve my deepest, most gut-twisting sorrow for murder victims who are innocent. Which sadly, cannot be said of Adam Toledo.

The Shimmering Sentience of the Social Media Commentariat

In defiance of practically every 2021 social norm, they act as one. United in their unswerving belief that they alone know. That they alone understand. That they alone possess the power to divine the true nature of a given incident.

Yes, even in the absence of facts they are somehow able to puzzle-out what really happened, based on—I don't know—their biases? Their prejudices?

In the aftermath of the shooting death of a thirteen year-old Latino youth by the Chicago Police Department, social media exploded with accusations and finger-pointing. This is another example of systemic racism! This is another example of a police department out of control!

As a sign at a subsequent demonstration read “Stop Killing Us!”

Seriously? Is that what we're doing? Am I permitted an eye roll?

As actual facts have been made available, it has become apparent that Adam Toledo wasn't the virginal innocent Black Lives Matter and other activists have painted him as. He wasn't a “baby”. He wasn't a “victim”.

He was a wayward youth embarking on a path that predicted his violent death.

You see, young Adam had just entered into a gang-banger internship. That's why he was out at 2:30 AM on a Sunday night, accompanied by an over twenty-one accomplice and shooting at cars. The gunpowder residue on Adam's gloves proves as much.

Gang-bangers like to employ young'uns because they are far less culpable.

After a prolonged foot chase, young Adam chose to turn towards a police officer with gun in hand. Acting in kind, that police officer shot Adam in the chest. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Go ahead. Call me a hater. Call me a racist. Even worse, call me a podium-pounding law-and-order Republican.

But I can't get too broken up about the death of a gang-banger-in-training. Sorry.

The intuitive geniuses on social media clearly know better. You know, the kind who believe that every police shooting of a person of color is unjustified and absolute proof of systemic racism. The kind who carry hysterically overblown signs reading Stop Killing Us!

I wonder if it has ever occurred to them that they act as blindly and as recklessly as the police they accuse.

I pity the decisions young Adam made. I pity the Chicago Police Department officer who will have to live with this memory for the rest of their life. I pity Adam's parents. I pity his family. No one is doing a jig.

And yet, Adam is a victim only in the sense that he fell prey to the world's worst role model—the ghetto. He was seduced by illusory images of gang life as being fatally and tragically heroic. That dying young would make him a martyr. 

I regret he will forever be unable to apply its final lesson.

Instead of making false and wildly misguided accusations, let's combat the reason why kids find gangs so alluring. Let's give them a sense of belonging that isn't centered on murder and mayhem.

Ya think?

Acting White

If nothing else, Milwaukee is rich in racial tension. The divide between blacks and whites is palpable. I’ve encountered hostile clerks in stores who plainly resent waiting on white folk. I’ve felt the heat of their glares and been the object of their contempt.

Likewise, I’ve seen the withering looks whites cast upon blacks. I've listened to whites complain bitterly about blacks and their effects on crime and housing and employment. But neither side has a monopoly. Like checkers and war, racial divides take two.

I wish I were an exception. But I struggle hourly to resist tagging an entire population with an unpleasant epithet based on the actions of a few. I live behind a multi-family housing unit populated with individuals seemingly bent on living down to every negative stereotype whites hold towards blacks.

The incessant rumble of hip-hop from car stereos, drunken parking lot pugilists and four AM rides who announces their presence with a car horn over and over again do little to foster a good night’s sleep, much less understanding and tolerance.

Yet I feel empathy when I read that unemployment among inner-city black males stands at fifty-percent. Or of another fatal shooting between warring gangs. Or the pathetic story of a desperate single mother with no alternative but to leave her infant in the care of an addict because she had to go to work or lose her job.

2009 has given me a great big taste of what it’s like to be black. As an over-forty male, I belong to a group that has absorbed more than its share of job loss. I have been marginalized. I am invisible. The frustration and the rage are incessant. The world’s primary interest in me is monetary. And if I don’t have any, I should just fuck off.

It is a struggle to keep hope alive. It is a struggle to resist mood-altering substances. It is a struggle to believe there’s a difference between looking for work and not looking for work, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary.

Being poor and unemployed is hard.

So when I hear the worst elements of black society dictating behavior and beliefs, it saddens me. It saddens me because I'm beginning to understand downtrodden. I'm beginning to understand being kicked when you're down.

Gangsters call getting an education acting white. As they do anything beyond being a street thug or a dealer. Success is white. Unless of course you play professional basketball or football or your name is Jay Z, Beyonce or Lil’ Wayne. That kind of success apparently isn't too threatening to gangsters.

Imagine the fall-out if I—as a white man—had condemned an entire population to such a narrow and unflattering definition. We would have needed bomb shelters—and rightly so. It’s demeaning and pathetic and a cultural death sentence the Klu Klux Klan itself would applaud. Wildly.

So why is it when gangsters tell blacks not to snitch, they comply? Why is it when gangsters point a finger at an office manager or an accountant or even a president and say they’re not black-enough, they’re listened to?

What isn’t black about being a doctor? What isn't black about being a department manager? Isn’t that uncomfortably close to what the good folk of Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia used to believe? That black people just weren’t good for much?

I’ve got more problems than an arithmetic text, and more issues than National Geographic. But in the music of black culture I found a mirror of my own struggles as a misfit. It was medicine, and it helped me. So when I see the culture responsible for that music embrace this destructive lowest common denominator, it bothers me.

It is a troubling irony that those who most need to look up are looking down.