Trauma In The Trenches of Gun-Weary Chicago
Do our school children get enough sleep? Do they get enough to eat? Are they ready for days of stringent testing? By the time our children arrive at school they are tired and weary. Their eyes are teary. In every moment of their young lives they live in the trenches. From Chicago to Los Angeles, to New York, Detroit, and back again, people blame the poor for a plight that is perhaps a societal making. When we deny our people decent jobs and quality healthcare, when food is scarce and children live in so-called school deserts, when trauma centers are nonexistent. What can we expect? There is trouble in the city,
Keauna Wise at her home in the Roseland neighborhood of Chicago, July 23, 2014. Photo by Peter Hoffman for MSNBCBy Trymaine Lee | Originally Published at MSNBC. August 4, 2014 10:02 AM—Updated August 4, 2014 05:58 PM
CHICAGO— Keauna Wise knows death could come at any moment. So she waits with knots in her stomach and tears in her eyes. She’s often breathless, with anxiety that climbs from the bottom of her feet up into her gut.
Death comes often in her neighborhood on the far south side of this city, mostly by bullets. It comes with a bang on long, hot summer nights.
She’s already lost a brother, an 8-year-old niece and dozens of family friends to gun violence. One of her sons was wounded in a shooting last year, and just about two weeks ago another family friend took his last breath in her eldest daughter’s arms after being shot .
Every day she waits for the bullets to come crashing home again. For the dreaded phone call informing her that one of her nine children, most likely one of the older boys, has been killed. The stress has nearly crippled her both physically and emotionally.
“Whatever’s going to happen, going to happen because I can’t do nothing about it. It’s sad to say but that’s how I look at it now,” said Wise, 37, on the steps of her modest home. “The doctors are telling me if I keep stressing I’m going to kill myself, that they’ll beempathyeducates – Trauma In The Trenches of Gun-Weary Chicago:
