I’ll walk by the flowers tomorrow, the ones on 54th Place, where Shaoxiong “Dennis” Zheng died, one block from my home and one block from the University of Chicago. The rain has blotched the handwritten notes and put out the candles, but each time I have passed by this week, someone was there, standing vigil. I hope someone still stands there in the morning.
After the killing U. of C. President Paul Alivisatos emailed students. “Our city struggles with many of the same issues of violence that afflict all large cities.” Oh? Students are also executed in broad daylight at UCLA, NYU, Rice and Penn? I hadn’t heard.
Paul wasn’t done. The university will respond by “mobilizing (its) academic and policy expertise” to reduce violence. Didn’t we try that after Yiran Fan was shot in January? And when Max Lewis was slain in July? Too late for Dennis.
I wonder if Paul bumped into Kim Foxx when she visited campus to enjoy the adulation of a student group on Wednesday, one day after Dennis passed. Does our “policy expertise” back her catch-and-release attitude toward gunmen? Were Dennis’ killers arrested before?
The University of Chicago, like Chicago itself, is led by deeply unserious people. The single bullet that so easily tore through Dennis couldn’t have killed this institution. But it did wound us and wounds compound. There were zero killings in Hyde Park in 2020, but five this year, and 2021’s not done. Assume present trends continue: what then? The best students will go elsewhere. The tenured faculty will pack their children and leave. Do the university’s leaders know that? Does the city?
The university brings enormous capital investment to impoverished South Chicago. It privately provides the South Side’s only Level I trauma center. Chicago needs this institution.
And one day, sooner than anyone thinks, it may die, too.
Whatever they are doing, it is not enough.
— Ben Schroeder, Chicago
Aaron Rodgers’ responsibility
Since Aaron Rodgers has been giving misleading information that made people presume he got the vaccine when he really didn’t, both he and the Green Bay Packers have been punished by the NFL by getting fined. Of course Aaron Rogers should be fined, but why also the Green Bay Packers? Is it because they are responsible for him? And why is the Packers’ fine so much bigger than Rogers’ fine?
Rodgers is an adult and not a minor that is under the age of 18 years old, so he should be fully responsible. And just last week he had got COVID-19 and because of it, he couldn’t play in the game against the Kansas City Chiefs. The Packers were fined $300,000 while both Rogers and Allen Lazard each were fined $14,650 for failing to follow the COVID-19 protocols. While the NFL doesn’t have rules that all players have to be vaccinated, they should still protect themselves even during the season since this is the second NFL season that is getting played since COVID-19.
— Stephen Verhaeren, Palos Park
Veterans Day reflection
Well, Veterans Day has come and gone and I guess I appreciate the appreciation. There wasn’t much of that when my group returned home from Vietnam in 1968, but after long reflection, I realized that the war was unpopular for good reasons.
U.S. involvement resulted from a string of terrible decisions by a tragically misguided military and civilian government. My hope was that after Vietnam our foreign policy strategists might be slower to pick up the military option. That hope died with the Iraq invasion. Any good results from the Vietnam experience? The military draft, which fell most heavily on Black, poor and less educated young men, has been suspended — indefinitely, I hope. I took army basic training with mostly Black draftees who likely went to Vietnam. One of them told me: “My mama says ‘Don’t you get on no boat. You come home and we’ll take care of you.'”
I hope that young guy didn’t get on any boat.
— Marc Carmichael, Homer Glen
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