The only path to a safer society
Everybody's sick of the current state of affairs, but we can't afford inadequate solutions
Indianapolis and Louisville are about 110 miles apart on a stretch of Interstate 65. The scenery along the route is pleasant, but gives no indication of the bucolic hills, deposited by the Wisconsin Glacier about 30,000 years ago, and lakes to be found either to the west or the east on any given state highway along the route.
Some of the communities in the area are doing better than others. It’s the same basic set of circumstances as is found throughout mid-America. Manufacturing activity, long the area’s economic driver, has dwindled, with a few notable exceptions. Attendant social problems, most stemming from addiction, plague these municipalities to varying degrees. Still, one will find statistics for church attendance and civic involvement in better shape than in many areas of the country.
Indianapolis and Louisville rank fifteenth and twenty-eighth, respectively, among US cities in population. Indy government tends toward a red hue, but not monolithically so. Louisville’s tends toward the blue.
Both have dealt with upticks in violent crime in recent years, but momentum on that front has gathered of late.
This happened yesterday afternoon in Indianapolis:
IMPD said one suspect is dead and another is in custody after two officers were shot Thursday afternoon on the city's east side.
Police said the incident started during an Indiana Crime Guns Task Force firearms investigation involving IMPD and the Lawrence Police Department.
As police attempted to pull the suspect car over around 12:40 p.m. in the area of 30th Street and North Post Road, a short chase began.
Police said there were multiple attempts to stop the chase by spinning out the suspect's car, which were unsuccessful.
According to police, the suspect's car reached a dead-end in a business' parking lot and continued into a grassy area behind houses before coming to a stop due to terrain.
After the police chase ended, IMPD confirmed a suspect and four IMPD officers shot at each other.
Police said the two officers who were shot were taken by fellow officers to Eskenazi Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. Both officers are said to be in stable condition at this time.
According to police, the suspect, only identified at this time as a 46-year-old man, was pronounced dead at the scene. Police said an AR-15-style rifle was found near the suspect.
Police said another suspect, who was the passenger in the suspect's car, ran but was taken into custody a short time later.
According to police, an IMPD car at the scene had multiple bullet holes in the hood, side of the car, and back and front windshields.
That morning, this occurred:
IMPD is investigating after a teenager was shot and killed Thursday morning on the city's east side.
Police responded to a report of a person shot in the area of Breen Drive and North Brentwood Avenue, near 38th Street and North Post Road, shortly after 6:30 a.m.
Police arrived and found a teenage male who had been shot.
Police said the victim was taken to a hospital in critical condition but later died from his injuries.
A family member identified the victim as 15-year-old Derrick Marsia Houston Jr. and said he was a sophomore at Arsenal Tech High School.
There’s also this:
One person is in stable condition at an Indianapolis hospital after police say a naked man possibly having a mental health crisis was firing randomly at passing cars on the city’s north side, striking at least four vehicles and one driver.
The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department and Carmel Police Department were both called around 8:10 p.m. to a Tom Wood Porsche dealership in the 3500 block of E. 96th Street for shots fired and a possible active shooter.
Upon arrival, officers were told by witnesses that a man, who was possibly nude, intoxicated and having a mental health crisis, was firing randomly at passing cars from the dealership’s parking lot.
Louisville started out last week with a mass shooting:
A gunman opened fire at a bank in downtownLouisville on Monday, killing at least five people — including a close friend of Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear — and injuring nine others, authorities said.
The gunman was identified as Connor Sturgeon, 25, who police said was an employee of Old National Bank on East Main Street, where the gunfire erupted at 8:38 a.m.
And capped the week off with another one:
Louisville Metro Police Department is investigating after six people were shot and two were killed in Chickasaw Park.
LMPD responded to the call around 9 p.m.
If one drives the final northern stretch of I-65 and heads west on I-80, one comes to Chicago, where mayhem broke out downtown last Saturday night:
Hundreds of teenagers flooded into Downtown Chicago on Saturday night, smashing car windows, trying to get into Millennium Park, and prompting a major police response. At least one person in a car was attacked.
Shots were fired near the corner of Madison and Michigan, and FOX 32 Chicago decided that it was unsafe to keep our news crew on the scene.
Two teens were wounded by gunfire in the crowds in the first block of East Washington Street. A 16 and 17-year-old boy were taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in fair condition with gunshot wounds.
A woman whose car was smashed by people jumping on the windshield said her husband was beaten as he sat in the driver's seat. He's been taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
Police were escorting tourists and others back to their cars in the Millennium Park garage.
The crowd was trying to get into Millennium Park, but there are checkpoints around the perimeter and people under 21 are not allowed without an adult.
Video posted on social media shows people standing on top of a CTA bus and dancing. The CTA said that some service through the downtown area was disrupted on Saturday night because of police activity.
Chicago police said nine adults and six juveniles were arrested. Most were charged with reckless conduct. A 16-year-old boy was charged with unlawful use of a weapon, and two people were charged with possession of a stolen vehicle.
The incoming mayor took the opportunity to go all sociological:
Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson said the city needs a "comprehensive approach to improve public safety."
"In no way do I condone the destructive activity we saw in the Loop and lakefront this weekend," Johnson said in a statement. "It is unacceptable and has no place in our city. However, it is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities."
Notice the "have been starved" passive voice. Some outside force made these kids do this. Is it up to someone else to take up the slack for these hooligans' lack of self-restraint?
The next metro area south of Louisville on I-65 is Nashville, where, you’ll recall, a gender-confused alum of a Catholic high school recently shot the place up, killing three children and three adults.
Glass-half-full types remind us that the odds of any of us encountering any of these situations are less than those for getting struck by lightning - that is, that life continues for most of us with no greater disruptions of our sense of well-being than the usual frustrations and annoyances, and perhaps some health or financial concerns.
But let’s pick - and here, maybe I’m being arbitrary, but I kind of think I’m not - an arbitrary point in time for the purpose of comparison. Let’s go with 60 years ago. April 1963. The point can be made that 1963 saw the Birmingham church bombing and the JFK assassination, but those came later in the year, which kind of proves my point. 63 can perhaps be seen as the year that the Great Unraveling began in earnest. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement was only a year away. The Watts riots, two years out.
But one thing is certain: As of April 1963, you didn’t have naked guys shooting at major-thoroughfare traffic from upscale car-dealership parking lots. You didn’t have two mass shootings bookend a week in a midwestern city. You didn’t have downtown riots in a midwestern city with no discernible catalyst other than some hooligans putting the word out among other hooligans.
And within five years, it had turned into the Tectonic Shift, as I illustrated in a post last June:
1968. The sunny vibes of the above-mentioned Summer of Love were giving way to New Left radicalism, manifested in such occurrences as the shutdown of classes and administrative-offices takeover at Columbia University the week before finals, and the riots outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. With Martin Luther King's assassination, the integrationist chapter of the civil rights movement came to a close and the rise of the Black Panthers filled the vacuum. CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite took the occasion of the Tet Offensive to opine to the public that America was bogged down in a quagmire in Vietnam.
Currents afoot would have effects that last to this day. The National Organization for Women was founded two years earlier. The Stonewall Inn riot would occur the following year. The Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision would be handed down five years later.
Pop-psychology movements such as Transactional Analysis, Primal Scream therapy and est appeared with the onset of the 1970s.
The above-discussed video takes on a certain poignancy when one considers the popular-culture changes wrought by 1968.
The Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, had died the previous year, and the group went from being a show-business act to being the agent by which all popular music took its cue from the rock ethos.
Expletives began appearing in movies. Steve McQueen uttered the term 'bullshit" in 1968's Bullitt and in 1969 the Sundance Kid, portrayed by Robert Redford yelled "Shit!" as he and Butch Cassidy, played by Paul Newman, jumped off cliff into a stream to escape an approaching posse.
In January 1969, Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, a novel about a young man confessing, in lurid detail, his wanking obsession to his therapist, was published.
For the record, I turned 13 in 1968.
Some very basic aspects of American life that were taken as givens in my childhood have undergone profound changes in ensuing decades. The marriage rate, in steady decline for years, fell to an all-time low in 2018. As of 2019, the US had the highest number of children living in a single-parent household in the world.
Three in ten Americans are now religiously unaffiliated.
Drug-overdose deaths in the US reached another record high this year.
As we all know, the spree-killing trend, which got underway in 1966, when Charles Whitman ascended the University of Texas campus tower in Austin and shot 16 people, has made our present year a grim succession of carnage scenes of near-daily occurrence.
Our toes are hanging over the precipice.
The About page of a Substack I recently subscribed to called Stillness in the West frames the situation thusly:
We live in a time of radical change. Even by the standards of modernity—itself a time of extensive upheaval and overturning—we are quickly losing our grip on things. The postmodernism of our own day is the exponential intensification of this same process of cultural, communal, and personal dissolution. How are we to respond? It often seems far from simple and we are blocked at every turn. Human will-to-power has indeed created marvels, but also the catastrophe we fear is unfolding before us. We have come to the end of our tether. Something has to give.
Indeed. Something has to give.
It’s time for us to take a fresh look at what it means to be a serious grownup. To be sure, I’m not advocating for a dour approach to life. In fact, levity, when engaged in with unsullied motives, is an essential component of a worthwhile existence.
But we have no time for preoccupation with the ephemeral, let alone, obviously, the dark.
Anybody who understands what’s really at stake needs to snap out of it and cut the nonsense.
I’ll go first - or at least try my damnedest.
It’s appropriate here to quote from another Precipice post, this one entitled “From Milk to Solid Spiritual Food”:
St. Paul, in his letter to the Hebrews, admonishes them for backsliding on the maturation process they’d pursued:
For truly, by this time you ought to be teachers, but instead you need to have someone teach you again what are the beginning principles of the oracles of God, and have become those in need of milk, and not of solid food.
He lobs the same charge at the Corinthians in his first letter to them:
Brothers and sisters, I could not address you as people who live by the Spirit but as people who are still worldly—mere infants in Christ. 2 I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. 3 You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere humans?
I find myself guilty as charged. If I am at all able to handle the truth correctly, it is fleetingly so.
It is so hard to escape the milieu I was formed in, the one I describe in the tectonic-shift piece linked above. We live in the world set in motion by that time.
So my question is, what is involved in getting stronger, in maintaining greater clarity?
What, indeed? You may have noticed I’m getting into posing questions here lately. There’s nothing rhetorical about them. Let’s put our brains and hearts together and focus intently on this.
Like I say, I’ll go first. I hereby resolve again to humbly pray about our current juncture, to develop my ability to apply the smell test to that which comes onto my radar, and to do what I can, understanding that I’ll fall short many times daily, to be an excellent person.
Wouldn’t more excellent people in the world be a good thing?
Ah, but how are we to define excellence?, says the postmodern.
Sorry, I see where that one is going. It’s an argument for relativism, and therefore doesn't pass the smell test.
No, the time has come to acknowledge our lodestar and along ourselves accordingly.
That’s the only way we’ll ratchet down the danger level in this society.