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on tweeting about chicago

there are certain weekends in chicago for which you know you have to brace yourself. the first hot weekend of summer; fourth of july; labor day. you know it’s coming, and it does. that monday the stats roll in: how many shot, how many wounded. and then come the tweets. “meanwhile in chicago…” etc. i’ve done it too. when you’re faced with something that’s so painfully out of your control, it’s soothing to “do” something. but what are we “doing?”

certainly there is an element of empathy here, of being of your city for better or worse, of grieving in unison. but the internet, twitter in particular, has a fun-house-mirror way of distorting sincere emotion into something hyperbolic, something a bit false, intentional or not. and the unavoidable reality of living in chicago is that there is not a single, unified chicago that can be claimed. i lived in chicago for the majority of my life but there are parts of chicago i can never claim, and wouldn’t dare to. for all intents and purposes, chicago is two cities. this is why when people (from the north side, from logan square, from NOT “chiraq”) use the term “chiraq” to describe “their” city it repulses me. you’re not from there. and you probably never set foot there. you don’t need to; the city’s been designed, in fact, so you can pretend “chiraq” doesn’t exist.

what, then, are we doing when we tweet things about the murder rate in “our city”? if i’m being completely honest, there is an undeniable element of the same type of voyeurism as contextless “trap” fetishism. this may sound harsh, and certainly, publicly mourning tragedy (whether or not it directly touches you) is nowhere near as crass as putting trapaholics drops in your edm-trap song you made in your parents’ basement. but can we avoid the edginess-by-association here? regardless of genuine empathy, genuine sorrow, there is an unavoidable and bitter-tasting element of “i need everyone to be aware that MY city is dangerous.” and well, yes, but no. again—i’m implicating myself here too.

does that mean it’s wrong to tweet these things? of course not. but are these tweets doing anything more substantial than acting as a signifier of some weird and false sort of badassery under the pretense of “spreading awareness”? because yes, these blood-stained weekends hurt—but tweeting and feeling, though entangled, are not the same. even when it’s impulsive and reactionary, you tweet things because you want to make a certain impression on people, even if the impression is as simple as “fyi, i care about this.”

i don’t know what to make of all this. it’s uncomfortable, always, to grapple with your own relative comfort. but at a certain point, sometimes the best way to contribute to a problem is to realize it’s not about you.