Note—It has been two years since the bloody attack on a Highland Park, Illinois Independence Day parade. The wounds are still raw, the trauma never really healed. Here is my blog post from this date in 2022.
As I was attending a reproductive rights rally in Crystal Lake on July 4th we got word of a shooting at an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, one of the toney and leafy North Shore suburbs of Chicago. Later during a family gathering at the Murfin Estate cell phones began to deliver grizzly details—roof-top shooter with an automatic weapon, six dead—initially—scores injured including children, a whole community traumatized. By the ten o’clock news the suspected assailant, a local troubled young man with death obsessions and neo-Nazi and Trumpist connections. The news in these parts has been filled with gory and tragic details, identification of victims, revelations of the perpetrator’s troubled life, and vigil after vigil.
Once again tragedy has moved me to commit poetry. Over the last twenty years I have written too many verses to count about gun violence and mass murder—enough to fill at least a slim volume or occupy a whole evening of readings. I have evidently become the poet laureate of carnage, grief, and rage. Yet here I am at it again.
But perhaps I have grown cynical and callous. Re-reading the verse below a few hours after writing made it seem so. But it actually reflected the conflicted emotions I was feeling. Especially after learning that an unarmed young Black man in Akron, Ohio was shot by police 60 times running away from a traffic stop while the murderous creep in Illinois was taken into custody without harm after a brief pursuit.
I may have been too harsh in my judgement. Despite its wealth and overwhelmingly white population, the eventual seven dead included four Jews, two elderly Latino men visiting the city for the parade, one Latina and her Irish American husband. The bad boy terrorist could not have picked better targets for a neo-Nazi, despite apparently spraying the crowd at random. But maybe the hometown scion knew his community well enough to figure out the likely victims.
At any rate, here is the latest Murfin verse.
The Day the Shield Failed
July 4, 2022
It turned out, after all,
that the protection
of wealth and White privilege
was not a Star Trek shield—
phasers, torpedoes
and ordinary bullets
did not bounce off
harmlessly
on a day of
gay celebration
of a founding mythos
and the very idea
of benevolent blessings
and invulnerability.
But there was plenty of harm
done that day
wrecked not by an alien
but a defective member
of their own privileged class
blithely handed his weapon
fit for any military carnage.
The next day they wandered stunned
amid abandoned chairs,
strollers, and heat spoiling treats
“not here,
not us,
not now,
not them
them
them.”
Pardon nice people
let me introduce you—
chickens, roost,
roost, chickens.
—Patrick Murfin
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