Chicago…2018
-‘Takin’ It To The Streets’-
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“You don’t know my kind in your world
Fairly soon the time will tell”
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The Doobie Brothers
Warner Records 1976
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Streets: They Give and They Take Away
As the heat of August ushered the last sighs of summer from a city, Chicago took to the streets. The streets: modern thoroughfares of high-speed movement hither and yon. The streets: also the most ancient of information highways.
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Herodotus On High Street
In a day and age so far from the original, original data transmitters, the couriers of ancient Persia who famously faced: ‘snow, rain, heat and gloom of night’. They were the horse-mounted default means of mass communication. Then.
In Chicago some millennia later it is, again: the streets, where information is brought and wrought. To express anger and contempt and distrust and disdain and all the things that abject frustration births. They took to the streets with message on a bright summer day in 2018. Chicago did.
How could it be? The streets: that place where the venerable, the medieval town crier had proudly trod and plied his “news”; were once the only place for the transit of primitive information. The streets had long since passed into history as a means of information communication, though. Until: August in Chicago.
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In the 21st Century they, the streets, were again chosen as the means of communication with an outside world. Information: in the form of noise and disruption all passed by the streets in Chicago but only at the speed of sound on this day. While the rest of the world whisked by: at the speed…of…light…
Yet. There they were, by the hundreds protesting a plight actually born: of those very streets. A plight perpetrated: by those very streets.
As if. The streets, which daily, bring so much pain and anguish and disappointment and death: could somehow; might somehow, this time somehow, serve up something good. Something somehow: soluble. Not likely, even this bright, sunny, day.
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Back to the Future and Michael Brown
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“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”
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Dr. Emmett Brown
Back To The Future
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The “streets” existed long before there was a “Michael Brown”. Yet. Michael Brown personified two things: one, that there was a life in the streets that was a default existence for those culturally cursed, and, two, that there was an element of the constabulary that was forced to engage these cursed and their streets each and every day.
There are those constables on patrol who enthusiastically seek the cursed pursuant to social complaint or criminal activity. There were those police who are caught in the web of authority, however. Cops that also by default, are, daily faced with the anger and irrationality of the citizens of the streets.
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Here might be the rub. Michael Brown met his demise in the streets. Because he was literally in the streets, otherwise he would likely be alive this day had he not been there in the streets. The choice was his…were he lucid…
Moreover, a blazing chapter in the vast volume of the sad state of cultural affairs for those societal disadvantaged and displaced. Would be empty and bare.
Yet. Michael Brown did confront an armed officer of the law. In the middle of the streets and Michael Brown did die at the hand of that officer. Literally: on the streets.
Michael Brown one-handedly wrote one of the single-most riveting chapters in the tortured tome of life in the streets, and: death in the streets. The streets have come to define the displaced as both a place of residence and intrigue as well as a place of defiance and, in Chicago this day: information.
Thus the streets were both an appropriate and an ironic place for Chicago to mass and inform the greater world of something that it already knows, by default: that the streets are dangerous. Maybe because the police are there- but more importantly because: the displaced are there and constantly begetting socially and criminally unprofitable interaction, with themselves and the forces of the law.
Thus came the clash and resultant information highway transmission that there is too much gun violence on the streets of Chicago. The early August march informed the world that there is a need for more authority in the streets to control those who are ill able to control themselves.
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Caesar On Lakeshore Drive
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‘The Fault Is Not In Our Streets…’
The shore that day was the spot. It had streets after all. So the information was set along the drive, Lakeshore Drive, such that information, in a loud primal, rather than tapping digital way; was expressed about the streets; where gun violence proliferates.
Proliferates, not so much because there are guns there, but rather because, in the streets, there are people, who use them. Guns. In the streets: that is where the people are when information stews and, trouble…brews.
Affluent streets and less affluent streets are paved of the same stuff. It is who uses them and for what purposes that makes the difference.
After all, there are more automobiles and peace in the more affluent neighborhoods. Those things seem to breed community and…traffic. A lesson to be learned by hundreds beating the hot pavement of the streets of Lakeshore Drive one summer’s day…
The highway is a place for traffic. The streets are a place to improve…
The fault is not in our streets. It is in ourselves…
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“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars
But in ourselves…”
Wm. Shakespeare
Julius Caesar
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Posted 1 minute ago by DILULIUS, King of Troy