By Donald Kirk
NEW YORK ― The latest news crackles over my car radio. Five killed in a night of violence, 40 injured. Two dead in another shootout, three injured. Two policemen suffering gunshot wounds.
You might think we were in a civil war. Maybe a skirmish in some remote jungle. Low-level shootouts between guerrilla soldiers armed and equipped by mysterious masters.
No, we're talking about everyday humdrum life in America's biggest city ― the center of arts and culture, high finance, and home of President Donald Trump and his enemy, the New York Times. Speaking of the Times, this kind of news is so routine, the paper hardly covers it. Minor stuff for deep-inside pages while COVID-19 and the presidential campaign fill large swaths of page one and inside layouts.
No, New York is not a battleground or "war zone," though some journalists might like to describe it that way. It's just a huge sprawling city caught up in everyday violent crime, like every other American city. Generally, you cruise down the broad avenues and narrow cross streets of Manhattan with nothing more to fear than hot-rodding taxis and lumbering trucks speeding by you.
Thanks to COVID-19, driving in New York and other cities is a lot easier now than when I drove around the city last year. Masses of people work at home, staying away from once-crowded streets. Broadway, the Great White Way, is dark, theaters closed, no traffic in the hour before curtains should be going up in dozens of theaters. Of course, whole sections of the city are off limits, not really safe, but you don't worry about them as you bypass the rough spots on parkways and expressways.
The violence as reported on my all-news radio station reminds me of old times in Vietnam, where I was a correspondent in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That war simmered on, but life in Saigon was good, restaurants and bars overflowing, military and civilian officials happy to dispense fact and fiction to the journalistic hordes. We might get away for up-close looks at the war as it ebbed and flowed, but we could always return to the relative safety of the capital.
The sense of a low-level war must be shocking to those who've lived most of their lives in countries like Korea where you seldom hear about gunfights and killings and weak-kneed mayors and governors who simply don't have the guts to act.
Trump, defender of law and order, upholds the constitutional right of Americans to bear arms regardless of the bloodshed. The liberal Joe Biden, amassing majority support for the November election but afraid of losing it, dares not challenge the God-given right of every citizen to heft a lethal weapon
One reason you don't hear a whole lot about all these killings is that usually they have nothing to do with the protests on city streets every time some crazed cop shoots a poor Black person whose on-the-spot punishment for defying law and order was sudden death or maiming.
The latest episode, in which a cop fired seven times into the back of a Black man in a middle-American, midwestern city, has ignited yet another wave of vandalism and violence. You have to wonder how long it will be before random shootings come together in mass killings ― or, God forbid, civil war.
The U.S. may not be there yet, but the extremes of protests and counter-protests suggest much greater dangers. What happens when some nut opens fire with one of those automatic rifles that the National Rifle Association says are just the thing for law-abiding citizens to carry? One massacre leads to another.
We've already had quite a few mass killings over the years. The list goes on and on. A dozen here, a score or more there. The lone individual whose hatred explodes in wanton death and destruction reaps the headlines before entering a life in prison.
That's to say nothing of the killing that gets updated every time I turn on the car radio. Not just in New York. So many died over the weekend in Chicago, so many more last night in Baltimore or some other city. Usually these killings are not important enough for anyone to know or care who got killed or why.
Just another day in the city in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic that's taken the lives of more people in the U.S. than in any other country. But that's another story.
Donald Kirk, www.donaldkirk.com, writes from Seoul as well as Washington.
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You might think we were in a civil war. Maybe a skirmish in some remote jungle. Low-level shootouts between guerrilla soldiers armed and equipped by mysterious masters.
No, we're talking about everyday humdrum life in America's biggest city ― the center of arts and culture, high finance, and home of President Donald Trump and his enemy, the New York Times. Speaking of the Times, this kind of news is so routine, the paper hardly covers it. Minor stuff for deep-inside pages while COVID-19 and the presidential campaign fill large swaths of page one and inside layouts.
No, New York is not a battleground or "war zone," though some journalists might like to describe it that way. It's just a huge sprawling city caught up in everyday violent crime, like every other American city. Generally, you cruise down the broad avenues and narrow cross streets of Manhattan with nothing more to fear than hot-rodding taxis and lumbering trucks speeding by you.
Thanks to COVID-19, driving in New York and other cities is a lot easier now than when I drove around the city last year. Masses of people work at home, staying away from once-crowded streets. Broadway, the Great White Way, is dark, theaters closed, no traffic in the hour before curtains should be going up in dozens of theaters. Of course, whole sections of the city are off limits, not really safe, but you don't worry about them as you bypass the rough spots on parkways and expressways.
The violence as reported on my all-news radio station reminds me of old times in Vietnam, where I was a correspondent in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That war simmered on, but life in Saigon was good, restaurants and bars overflowing, military and civilian officials happy to dispense fact and fiction to the journalistic hordes. We might get away for up-close looks at the war as it ebbed and flowed, but we could always return to the relative safety of the capital.
The sense of a low-level war must be shocking to those who've lived most of their lives in countries like Korea where you seldom hear about gunfights and killings and weak-kneed mayors and governors who simply don't have the guts to act.
Trump, defender of law and order, upholds the constitutional right of Americans to bear arms regardless of the bloodshed. The liberal Joe Biden, amassing majority support for the November election but afraid of losing it, dares not challenge the God-given right of every citizen to heft a lethal weapon
One reason you don't hear a whole lot about all these killings is that usually they have nothing to do with the protests on city streets every time some crazed cop shoots a poor Black person whose on-the-spot punishment for defying law and order was sudden death or maiming.
The latest episode, in which a cop fired seven times into the back of a Black man in a middle-American, midwestern city, has ignited yet another wave of vandalism and violence. You have to wonder how long it will be before random shootings come together in mass killings ― or, God forbid, civil war.
The U.S. may not be there yet, but the extremes of protests and counter-protests suggest much greater dangers. What happens when some nut opens fire with one of those automatic rifles that the National Rifle Association says are just the thing for law-abiding citizens to carry? One massacre leads to another.
We've already had quite a few mass killings over the years. The list goes on and on. A dozen here, a score or more there. The lone individual whose hatred explodes in wanton death and destruction reaps the headlines before entering a life in prison.
That's to say nothing of the killing that gets updated every time I turn on the car radio. Not just in New York. So many died over the weekend in Chicago, so many more last night in Baltimore or some other city. Usually these killings are not important enough for anyone to know or care who got killed or why.
Just another day in the city in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic that's taken the lives of more people in the U.S. than in any other country. But that's another story.
Donald Kirk, www.donaldkirk.com, writes from Seoul as well as Washington.
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