Chicago attack scores direct hit on balancing freedom and fear
As I watched the horrific, hate-filled viral video this week of a mentally challenged young man being tortured, taunted, tied up, cut and forced to drink water from a toilet, I wasn’t seeing black or white.
I wasn’t seeing liberal or conservative, right or left.
I wasn’t seeing Black Lives Matter or Trump matters. I saw my sons. They’re 19 and 20, nearly the same age as the victim in the video and also intellectually disabled. They are young men who struggle to comprehend their world and live as close to a normal adult life as they are able — as I let them.
In that video, I saw my nightmare, which becomes more real because, as my sons grow up, it’s harder to keep them in the safe cocoon I have tried to keep them in since they were two timid foster boys brought to my door in diapers.
Maybe that’s what happened that New Year’s Eve when that young man’s parents dropped him
off to meet a friend at a McDonald’s in a suburban area of Chicago.
Maybe they thought they could loosen the cocoon just a little because they were thrilled, as I would be, that their son — described in news accounts as being 18 and having “diminished mental capacity” or being “mentally disabled” — had made a friend.
They must have thought a sleepover was such a wonderful opportunity, knowing, as we parents of special needs children do, that socializing does not come easy in a society that does not understand them, nor wants to.
But what happened in the three days after those parents dropped off their son, recorded in an ugly video livestreamed on Facebook and shared by millions, must have broken their hearts. He trusted too much. They trusted too much.
That 28-minute video, plus a few other shorter ones that have surfaced, is hard to watch, harder to understand how any human could act without conscience to commit such evil, especially on a helpless young man.
In the video, two sisters and two males, including the young man’s friend, cut his scalp with a knife, punched and kicked him, and laughed as they repeatedly forced his head into a toilet. Other scenes show the young man crouched in a corner, his mouth taped, his wrists and feet bound as his tormentors cut his hoodie off with a knife and flicked ashes onto his bloody head.
The look on the young man’s face is one of confusion and pain, as if he is unsure what is happening to him. I know that look. In the video, someone off camera shouts, “F--- Donald Trump” and “F--- white people.” Someone orders the young man to say, “I love black people.”
And, yes, the four accused assailants, ages 18 to 24, are black and the young man is white. That, along with those words, have generated an angry outcry that seems more focused on the racial and political implications of the torture rather than the torture itself.
“Where is the outrage from liberals?” one of my Facebook friends asked. “If this was a man of color being treated this way by four white people, the country would be burning.”
On Twitter, various misspellings of the hashtag “BLMkidnapping” trended this week, though Chicago law enforcement say there is no connection between the accused attackers and the Black Lives Matter, or BLM, movement.
Shaun King, one of the most outspoken BLM activists, wrote this of the attack: “What we are witnessing here is that fact that when particular African-Americans commit a crime, many whites use the crime to cast aspersions and stereotype all black folk. It’s a ridiculous double standard rooted in racism and oppression.”
He referenced several other crimes in which no similar outrage arose, including the horrific Oct. 23, 2015, attack of a young black man by several white players on a high school football team in Dietrich, Idaho.
The young man, who is also 18 and mentally challenged, had a coat hanger thrust into his rectum by one player while another held him down and a third kicked it in deeper.
I had never heard of this attack, but I am just as outraged and fearful over it as I am for what happened in Chicago. I suspect the Idaho incident did not generate the same level of public outrage because it was not captured on video and shared on social media.
The four suspects in the Chicago attack have been charged with numerous felonies, including committing a hate crime — more, police say, because the victim is mentally disabled than because he is white.
But there will be those, rightly or wrongly, who continue to see what happened in Chicago in black and white, liberal and conservative. For me, I will see it as another chilling reminder that the world is a dangerous place for special needs people like my sons and that, when they venture out into it, no matter how old they are, I must strive to find that impossible balance between the safe restriction of the cocoon and their yearning to belong in a world where freedom and evil coexist.