Tragedy At Home

Shared Suffering:


On Thursday madness visited quiet Kirkwood again for the third time in the last few years. There was the Kirkwood cop who was killed in Meacham Park and the perpetrator of that crime was tried several times in St. Louis County, always to the same result. There was Michael Devlin and now there is Cookie Thornton. 5 people killed in a city council meeting and the Mayor in ICU after having been shot in the face twice.

Kirkwood, simply put is a great little town. Good schools, rising property values, old train station where the train still stops, nice rivalry with Webster Groves, not too far out or too far in. They call themselves middle classed but that of course is a lie. It is an upper middle class enclave with more then it’s share of million dollar homes and Mc Mansions but it does still maintain some of the vestiges when it was a distant, small town suburb of downtown St. Louis. It is a nice place. A really nice place and in quintessential St. Louis fashion it is a “great place to raise your kids”.

All of that having been said they have been having a Payton Place like run f bad luck, violence, accusations of racism and with the Devlin thing that ultimate squeamish creepiness that no one can wrap their minds around. Kirkwood’s challenge to defending it’s image of itself has always been the Meacham Park area. Even when I was a kid riding a bike around my parents and grandparents admonished me that there was an area between Kirkwood and Crestwood that was a no mans land. What that meant was that it was a place that a little white kid on a bike should not be riding through. The fact is I never thought much about it other then observing that it was a run down area in a lot of ways and seemed predominantly black. I am told there was a time when it was really it’s own community with black run businesses and bars and it’s own infrastructure but by the time I became aware of it, it was just a disappearing community.

Kirkwood thought it had solved it’s Meacham Park “problem” by paving it over. Over the protests of the local home owners (or renters) Wal-Mart and Target paved a solid 3rd of town. Problem solved! Well... not quite. Instead it was walled off even more and more compressed and clearly from what we have seen over the last few years, very well policed with revenue from the new retail tax base. So the pot was set to boil and the rest of us walked away hoping nothing bad would happen. But bad things have happened and it seems from the position just outside that town, knowing little of the facts that neither Kirkwood, nor Meacham Park can reconcile one another existence and Kirkwood law enforcement, attempting to enforce Kirkwood’s laws in meacham Park is, for lack of a better term, a disaster.

The Kirkwood Police Department by the way, from my perspective is one of the top law enforcement organizations in the area. Professional and polite. Extremely competent while still being courteous whether giving tickets or breaking up a party or investigating a crime. But to ask them to enforce laws that make total sense in Kirkwood (like not parking vehicles on the street because it looks “tacky” and “hurts property values” in Meacham Park cannot feel like anything but spite and harassment to the residents involved. Anyway... it is like anything else, a complex problem with no simple answers. The fact is they are part of Kirkwood and Kirkwood has laws, and discretionary enforcement of those laws is probably fraught with it’s own peril. That is not what i really wanted to talk about... what I wanted to talk about was the larger communities sense of shared suffering at the recent violence on Thursday.

St. Louis is NOTHING if it is not an inbred small town with a long memory. And you can tell me we are the 15th or 26th or whatever largest metropolitan area and I will still hold that we are much more like Mayberry then NYC or even Chicago. The six degrees of separation, or six degrees of Kevin Bacon telescope down to four, three and sometimes two degrees of separation from everyone else in town. Everyone either personally knows someone who was in that council chamber or knows someone who knows someone and for some reason that gives us all license to personalize this as our own tragedy. I am sure every town is like this but i remember being slightly baffled but (surprisingly) too polite to comment on the same phenomenon after 9-11 when everyone knew someone who worked in the World Trade Center and felt compelled to tell you about it.

A lot of this is very natural and even kind. Any group that suffers violence and trauma needs to deal with the real grief of the people really really effected. The families destroyed, the kind and even brilliant people lost, the psychological trauma of the survivors, all need to be loved and acknowledged by the community at large. It is a healthy part of the healing process. What is more problematic is the sense of shared violation and anger at... anyone. Right now we have Cookie Thornton’s idiot mother and brother blathering into the cameras. But seriously, these people are idiots. I do not know whether it is more irresponsible for them to say what they are saying (which seems to condone and rationalize the violence) or whether it is worse that the media put them on the news. I think... that I think it is the latter.

But if we were not angry and blaming his family we might next look to blame someone else. I know over the next year we will all have to deal with heightened security at ALL community meetings and that FOX 2 News and the Post Dispatch will be running exposes about WHY THE POLICE CANT KEEP US SAFE! And that is a shame because they will scare a lot of people and we will spend millions of dollars of taxpayer money and thousands of hours of police time to protect us all from what is a very isolated incident involving mental illness and stupidity and you cannot defend us all from those things all the time and it is asinine for us to expect it. We will have metal detectors at every city council meeting, every school board meeting and soon every condo association, PTA, AA and Boyscout meeting because somehow it is the governments job to keep us safe from everything and everyone, no matter how crazy and random.

This shared suffering needs to take a different form. A healing form. In this primarily Christian Community we need to react as Christians and love and heal the victims and the survivors of this tragedy and then, if we really want to model Christ we need to try and love and understand the sad twisted people who spawned this kind of violent rage. That is the hard part. It is not a situation that gives rise to easy, glib, Nancy Grace, Rush Limbaugh answers. It goes to our basic social fabric and flies in the face of the main credos of our current government which are “pull yourself up by your own boot straps” and take “personal responsibility” for yourself and your actions. All of which make perfect sense for our Ivy Leagued, Haliburtoned shareholdered leaders but make less sense even for us privileged, white, upper middle classed, college educated (often on someone else’s nickel like myself) and well insulated mid-westerners. I can tell you though that they make no sense to a on of a single mother working two jobs and still not making ends meet. Ultimately as Christians and as people we need to come to grips with the fact that that angry kid is part of our community and part of our responsibility. But there is the rub.

As they said in the film “New Jack City”...”Am I my brothers keeper?... Yes I am”. That is what ALL our religions teach us... I think.