Brothers Gotta Live

(photo by Jill Toyoshiba, KC Star)

Although you probably wouldn't know it, this blog started partially out of a frustration with crime in the city, which at the time I'd just moved back to. I wound up deciding instead to write about the frivolous, fun and attractive aspects of life in Midtown and KC in general (and beyond) but I've always remained somewhat preoccupied with the violence that goes on nearby; fascinated with how far removed these kinds of things are from my reality and yet how close they are to where I live.

Of course, I haven't offered any solutions, and my own involvement in helping improve the city's situation has been mostly non-existent, aside from a bit of online hand-wringing. I aim to change that in the future, though I don't know exactly how just yet.

One voice that stands out to me is Midtown Miscreant, a local writer who many of you might have seen featured in the Pitch Weekly cover story last month. He doesn't profess to having the answers either, but he does draw attention to crimes and call folks to task for their actions or lack of accountability. His posts about the recent vandalism of monuments, churches and other inanimate objects by so-called "anarchists" have been particularly strong.

As fun as it can be to live near the Art Institute and amid the cheaper apartment housing that's home to so many students and twentysomethings, I wonder what's up with some of these kids. The other day a couple of girls I know who are a few years younger were talking about how a guy threw a molotov cocktail into an abandoned building next to Harlings. "Yeah," the girl said. "It's awesome."

What? Awesome? Starting a fire in an abandoned building and then running away? Yeah, it's just about as courageous as the folks that broke windows at the nearby Obama office three times during the campaign.

I just wonder when people started equating anarchy with property damage, as if that's all there is to it.

After last week's destruction at a 100-year-old church in the neighborhood, I was upset, just like a lot of other area residents. I figured if I came across one of these kids in action it would be somewhat satisfying to personally put a stop to it. But of course my mother did not raise me to hit nobody, and the chances of encountering them in the first place is unlikely.

Instead of becoming some kind of vigilante, I'd rather challenge these kids to reexamine how exactly they go about trying to introduce "change" and revolution to the world. To quote Joseph Campbell:

"Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something, it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out."

Now, about the murder issue...

I was pleased to see the Star's Tony Rizzo and photographer Jill Toyoshiba do such a great job on in the three-part feature called "Murder Factory," which is about life and death in the neighboring zip code, which produces more murderers than anywhere else in the state. Say what you will, the story addresses some difficult subjects -- interviewing murderers, their families, those who have lost children, had their homes riddled by gunfire, seen their streets go from respectable neighborhoods to overgrown, nightmarish crime zones. The series raises some tough questions, and the photo essay alone is worth spending some time looking through.

The final part, which ran today, examines real cost of crime (16 million to incarcerate 100 people for 10 years) vs. the ways some of that money could be spent to help prevent crime, with programs in Newark, NJ and Boston used as an example. The article also addresses how it's no so much evil as it is indifference that allows these kinds of crime to continue with such frequency (i.e. Hannah Arendt's idea of the banality of evil).

I drive through 64130 quite a bit, usually en route to Swope or somewhere like that, and while I don't make a point to spend time there, I don't want to ignore it. The only times I've spent much time in the Ivanhoe neighborhood was while volunteering for a housing rehab project as part of "Christmas in October." I remember being in the basement of an elderly black couple working on repairing a staircase or something and seeing a sticker on one of the beams that must have been placed there a few decades ago. It was some kind of affirmation about the need for unity in the black community. Though I don't remember exactly what it said, the last lines were "Brothers don't got to die. Brothers got to LIVE."

I probably won't be discussing crime here much in the future, as I plan to completely change the format of this site and do something different than the infrequent commentary and event and photo stuff I've put up in the past. But for now I'm glad that people are talking about what's going on. In the future I hope it leads to more actions being taken and real change being brought forth by those of us who live in Kansas City. Even if we don't live in the middle of the roughest patches, that doesn't mean we shouldn't do our part to help improve the situations of our brothers to the east.

respectfully,

LW