Once you could count on the media to keep track of the passage of time. Not just the days of the week, the wheel of the seasons, the arrival of holidays, but larger spans. We love anniversaries: It’s been 10, 25, 50, 100 years since such-and-such occurred. Some are lighthearted and fun — a century since Mr. Fig met Mr. Newton. Some tragic. I almost began the next sentence, “Either way, this is important because…” but I’m not sure it is important.
Maybe it is. Anniversary stories remind readers of important events, and I suppose tell those new to the scene what they’ve missed. Journalists would sometimes roll their eyes at the obligatory Dec. 7 Pearl Harbor anniversary stories — if we missed one, readers would scream at us as if we’d bombed the USS Arizona ourselves — but I bet at least a few readers looked at the stories and thought, “The Japanese attacked us? Really? When?”
In that respect, such stories can be essential recognition, like a tolling bell, a guttering candle, a dip of the head in respect to something significant that happened and we must not forget. The calendar becoming a sort of a free safety, grabbing significant facts before they elude us entirely.
This Sunday, Oct. 20, is the 10th anniversary of … what important Chicago event? Anything come to mind? See, this is why these pieces have value. I’d be pressed to cough up an occurrence from 2014 unprompted. The Obama presidency … that hopeful world before Donald Trump went down that escalator. And … ?
What else? Any guesses? A significant, city-shaking moment. National news.
This is how I describe it in my book, “Every Goddamn Day”:
“On the dashcam video you can see squad cars, one, two, three of them. You see Laquan McDonald, 17, walking down the center of Pulaski Road, a little hop in his step before Officer Jason Van Dyke, within two seconds of exiting his car, gets into his shooter’s stance and fires 16 shots into the teen, who spins to the ground.”
That’s enough. After 10 years the video is as clear as if I watched it just now. The little puffs of dust coming off the teen as the bullets tear into his inert body. Van Dyke became the first Chicago police officer in 35 years to be charged with first-degree murder in connection to a duty-related shooting. He was sentenced to seven years in prison and got out after serving three.
Detained a thousand days for executing a young man who was walking away from him, carrying a three-inch knife. Those who still believe in the possibility of change clamored for change.
The crime was so large, we sometimes forget how smoothly the police officers on the scene closed ranks, and lied about everything. Something so standard we hardly ever pause to reflect on it. Has it ever occurred any other way? I can’t recall one episode. Ever.
Jason Van Dyke enters the courtroom for his sentencing in January 2019.
Sun-Times file
There was other fallout. Mayor Rahm Emanuel decided, well, maybe he didn’t love the city as much as he was continually professing he did, and decided not to run for re-election, leading to a pair of sub-par replacements, first the grim Lori Lightfoot, now the feckless Brandon Johnson. Emanuel slunk off to become the American ambassador to Japan, which is about as far from Chicago as you can get without leaving the earth’s magnetic field. Mark my words, like a bad penny, he’ll be back.
So a life lost — Laquan McDonald would be 27 now. A competent if jerkish mayor exiled. A city pushed down a bad road. McDonald is part of a skein of wrongly killed Black victims whose recorded deaths would rattle everything — sort of a dry run for the cataclysmic George Floyd killing in 2020. Plus yet another reminder that there are few situations a gun can’t make worse.
The anger the Laquan McDonald shooting sparked seems to have run dry lately. Now any murmurs about holding police accountable are drown out in cries that the speaker is trying to defund the police. As if that is the choice: if the laws must apply to the cops, then we’ll have no laws and no cops. The middle ground, a nation of laws that also apply to the police, hardly seems on the table anymore. Like it was crazy to expect that.
That’s the downside of looking back. You hope to find progress, but too often all we see is decay.
Laquan McDonald