I'm off tomorrow at 12:00pm to the big apple. Wish me luck!

Upcoming Travels

I'm going to be a bit scarce for the next couple of weeks as I'm doing a bit of traveling both for work and pleasure. I'll be in Indianapolis for a conference for most of this week which will be a nice respite from work (which I need), and then at the end of the following week I'm off to New York my excuse is that "I have to attend a Halloween party" which is probably my most pathetic excuse for visiting New York for the 4th time in the past two years, and yes, I'm staying in Brooklyn again (but a different part this time). I'll probably take some more pictures of New York, but I doubt I'll be taking that many pictures of Indianapolis ;)

And by the time I get back, the elections will thankfully be over.

...I can't wait.

on the poltics of being shot

Without going into too many details to protect the privacy of the person in question, I know someone (and have known this person more than a few years) whose loved one was rather brutally murdered on the street last week in a seemingly random shooting. He was shot in broad daylight on his own street and left behind children. It is something that has affected me emotionally and has woken me up a couple times at night because I cannot imagine the pain and fears this person, now a single mother, feels.

What really maddens me though is how flippantly such things are addressed in the media if one is seen to be living in an undesirable location or is of the wrong gender or color (this was an African American male living on the south side). This person’s story was regulated to a small blip in the newspaper, there was no follow up, and there will be no follow up about whether or not they’ve caught the perpetrator or why this horrible act even occurred because the story was (and sadly is) seen as being too common to waste the readers time with. Until now I can see why that might be, I’ve never spent too much time reading the accounts of murders such as this in the local paper, but now I’ve thought about this every day, I wonder if they’ve caught this person, I wonder what is going on, and I don’t know how to ask, I can’t ask. You just can’t walk up to someone and ask them ‘so have they found the guy who killed your husband’ over coffee at work, my God, you would have to be an awfully crass and socially broken person to do so, actually, I know that when I see her next, I’ll probably have to struggle not to cry. And I think about this every time I read a headline that starts “man shot on the …..”

To make matters even worse, on the same day, there was an article in the paper about a shooting in my neighborhood about 3 blocks from my house. This shooting happened late at night, in front of a trendy restaurant, by a known gang member, nobody was killed, or even seriously injured, yet it received much more press, and was even covered in the local “hipster blogs” because it involved a trendy street full of rich white people and someone could have been hurt.

I am still seething, and heartbroken.