Heroes vs. real terror
So this time the country dies a little more with Nykea Aldridge, pushing a baby stroller across the Parkway Gardens neighborhood in Chicago, the 6300 block of South Calumet Ave., shot dead and becoming the latest American to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, which means anyplace where a gun is in the wrong hands.
So we pay a little more attention to this shooting death in Chicago than to a couple of thousand other shooting deaths there because Nykea Aldridge is the cousin of Dwyane Wade, a famous basketball player born in Chicago who will come home this season to play for the Bulls.
This time we stop and take a look at a young mother, smiling and wearing big glasses in one of the photographs we are seeing in some of the online stories about her death. We learn that she was on her way, in the last days of August, to register her other children for school at the Dulles School of Excellence. She dies doing that, in America. In the process, she becomes the latest face of gun violence in America, at this time when you are supposed to believe that all we have to do to sleep better at night is build a wall and keep Syrian refugees out of the country.
It is guns and gun violence that are a defining story at this time in this country, even as the presidential campaign degenerates into name-calling about bigotry. Now this kind of tragedy comes into the life of Dwyane Wade, who not so long ago stood on the stage at the ESPY Awards in Los Angeles and talked about race and guns and anger and division.
Here is what Wade said that night:
“The shoot-to-kill mentality has to stop. Not seeing the value of black and brown values has to stop. But also the retaliation has to stop. The endless gun violence in places like Chicago, Dallas, not to mention Orlando, it has to stop. Enough. Enough is enough . . .”
By the way? This is what Hillary Clinton has said on the campaign trail, even as she is accused of wanting to somehow abolish the Second Amendment if she is elected President, as if somehow any President has that power or right:
“I’m not looking to repeal the Second Amendment. I’m not looking to take people's guns away . . . . I am looking for more support for the reasonable efforts that need to be undertaken to keep guns out of the wrong hands.”
But in the shadow of the shooting death of a young mother in Chicago, because of a gun in the wrong hands, on her way to register children for school, Clinton’s opponent, Donald Trump, goes right to Twitter and writes this about the death of Dwyane Wade’s cousin, not so long after he asked “Second Amendment people” to organize against Clinton.
“Just what I have been saying. AFRICAN-AMERICANS WILL VOTE FOR TRUMP,” he wrote.
Of course he is the endorsed candidate of the National Rifle Association, which never thinks stories like Nykea Aldridge are about the gun; which has demonized Clinton on guns every chance it has gotten; which thinks you could never possibly have enough guns in America.
This is an organization that has become one of the most powerful lobbies in American history, as it has also become the home office for a lie as big as its political war chest: that any form of gun sanity is an assault on the Second Amendment. The irony of standing with the NRA as you mourn the death of Nykea Aldridge is almost breathtaking. You can only imagine the outrage if it had been an undocumented immigrant who put a bullet in the head of Nykea Aldridge.
There are always more issues than one at play when someone new is shot dead, especially in a place like Chicago, where the numbers of shooting deaths this year alone are almost biblical. Certainly Wade was right to talk about black values and brown values even before he spoke to retaliation that night before the ESPY Awards. Somehow, though, we always keep coming back to the gun, in a country where anybody can get one. You know what real terror is? It is that. It is Nykea Aldridge not being safe in the afternoon on South Calumet Ave., pushing a baby stroller.
It did not matter whether she was the intended victim or not, whether she was targeted for assassination the way cops were targeted in Dallas, or whether she was another African-American shot dead by a cop somewhere else.
“We need more help & more hands on deck,” Wade himself said on Twitter. “Not for me and my family but for the future of our world.”
Wade didn’t make a political statement on this day. Didn’t try to turn tragedy into votes. What he did was speak better for his country than any politician. But he had already done that at the ESPY Awards. Enough is enough.