Recalling Highland Park and the Day That the Shield Failed—Murfin Verse

Mourning in Highland Park.

Note—It has been four 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 troubled local   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.

Mostly Jewish and Latinx, the Highland Park victims perhaps not so random.

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

  

Wake Up Uncle Sam! Murfin Verse for Independence Day Encore

  

                                    Uncle Sam Dozing by J.C. Leyendecker.

None of my detailed historic posts about today, family tradition musings, or sharing the text by Long Tom and the boys.  Most of you have seen those anyway.  I was asked to come up with a chalice lighting for Fresh Eggs or Sanctuary a worship service at the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation shared on Zoom due to the Coronavirus pandemic in 2021 led by our interim minister Rev. Jenn Gracen.  The Independence Day and poem I came up with was inspired by that and our conflicted feelings over the Founders, Declaration of Independence, White privilege, and patriotic symbolism.

The prompt for the poem was taken from a 1924 cover of the Saturday Evening Post by artist J.C. Leyendecker.

Wake Up Uncle Sam!

Independence Day 2021

 

As an allegorical figure you have seen better days,

            heroic posters, Saturday Evening Post covers,

            Jimmy Cagney dancing stiff legged,

            even stilt walkers in Main Street Parades.

 

But as a shrewd Yankee trader ready to sell some

            cure-all elixir at inflated prices,

            at least you were truer to the spirit of America

            than some goddess Columbia in a Liberty Cap

            or crowned Lady in a Harbor offering

conditional welcome to swarthy and pitiful refugees.

 

Like the Flag that bedazzles your swallow tail suit,

            high top hat, and pantaloons you have become

            an empty symbol of chest-thumping jingoism

            devoid of the promises of that Declaration

            we are supposed to celebrate today

            or any of the ringing rhetoric

            that promised us something different

            and finer, more noble and widely embracing.

 

We never quite lived up to all that hokum and hurrah

            no matter what a show we made of that banner

            and frankly of you.

 

No wonder you needed a nap.

            but that M-80 lit under your tilted chair

            should wake you up at last.

 

The enemies of Liberty are afoot.

            It is time to wake up defend

            those old promises,

snake oil though they might have been.

 

—Patrick Murfin

Remembering Highland Park The Day the Shield Failed—Murfin Verse

 

Mourning in Highland Park.

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.

Mostly Jewish and Latinx, the Highland Park victims perhaps  not so random.

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