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Chiraq Versus the World

Tragedy at home is familiar, and thus easier to ignore.

Blood Money GBE aka Big Glo aka Chief Keef’s cousin was shot and killed in Chicago last week. Over two-dozen shell casings were found at the scene. He was 30 years old and had just signed a deal with Interscope with a rumored $50,000 advance. He had five children.

Over dinner Friday night, a friend of mine expressed a little concern with the outpouring of sadness after Blood Money’s passing. It made him uncomfortable to see (white, suburban) Chief Keef fans on Twitter mourning the loss of one of his weed carriers. Unlike Lil Reese or Fredo Santana, Glo hadn’t really made an impact with his rapping. He was arguably better known for licking shots at Shy Glizzy’s posse in DC (as reported by Lil Reese on Twitter). At some point, my friend opined, people need to realize that this shit is real life with real consequences: how shocked can you be when violence comes full circle?

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In 2014, we are inundated with tragedy. If you and the people you surround yourself with are the least bit #woke, you quickly realize the sheer bulk of the suffering in the world. Syria’s civil war reduced a totally modern country to a pile of rubble in a few short, tragic months. The Central African Republic is in its second year of yet another battle against rebel factions. A bus bomb killed 71 people in Abuja, Nigeria yesterday. At home and abroad, Bush’s pointless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue to take their toll.

As if current-day tragedies don’t weigh heavily enough on our minds, forgotten and overlooked struggles from the past haunt us as well. In the last few weeks, billboards for the Khojaly Massacre have appeared in the New York subway. Khojaly is a town in southwest Azerbaijan. In 1992, in the middle of the Nagorno-Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Armenian forces took Khojaly and gunned down hundreds of Azerbaijani citizens fleeing the city.

The Khojaly billboards are succinct and well-designed with handsome typography. The Justice for Khojaly website has trendy parallax scrolling. This is essentially an ad campaign for a war crime. That said, it worked. I would never have heard about Khojaly were it not for the subway ads and I remembered the name with little or no effort. In 2014, tragedy needs PR. With so much horribleness vying for our attention, domestic troubles are easy to write-off. Post-Soviet ethnic cleansing, inscrutable Muslim insurgencies and old-school gaffling of territories are problems for which we have no good answers. Tragedy at home, however, is familiar and thus easier to ignore.

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The problem is that Chicago is part of America, while Syria and Ukraine are not. And while we wring our hands and debate the very bad diplomatic and military options we have for conflicts abroad, we aren’t obligated to do a damn thing. On the other hand, gun violence in Chicago (among other crime-ridden pockets of our country) is our problem. It’s not happening somewhere overseas where maybe someone you know is stationed or a friend has relatives. It’s happening on your turf. And while it’s all well and good to shrug off Blood Money’s murder as “just what happens when you live that life,” you are voting for the people who are supposed to stop shit like that, or at the very least paying tax dollars that are supposed to be used for that purpose. Not surprisingly, our government spending is in line with the way we think about tragedy. We spend a disproportionate amount on the military while letting education at home languish financially. There’s no straightforward solution to gang violence, but pumping more money into underfunded urban schools is a good start.

For the record, the highest count for deaths at Khojaly is 613. There were 415 homicides in Chicago in 2013.

Skinny Friedman is a writer and DJ living in New York. He's on Twitter - @skinny412

Want more? Read Gabriel Herrera's essay on Chiraq, Narrative, and Narrative in Chicago.