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You're Not Alone
How does a city emerge from such wreckage? How do individuals? What does the violence do to the social compact? To the collective and personal psyche? Drive through the city’s West and South sides, and you’ll be greeted by an array of Block Club signs, and on each of them, neighbors have listed not what they celebrate, but rather what they fear: No gambling (Penny pitching or dice playing.) No drug dealing. No alcohol drinking. No sitting in or on cars. They speak not to their dreams, but rather to their fears. These are communities, to borrow a term from the world of psychology, that are hyper-vigilant, that are back on their heels, trying, understandably, to keep the world at bay.
The novelist and Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien has talked about how the atrocities and nastiness of battle gets in your bones. The same can be said for kids growing up in certain neighborhoods in Chicago. The ugliness and inexplicability of the violence in our cities comes to define you — and everyone around you. With just one act of violence the ground shifts beneath you, your knees buckle and all you can do is try as best you can to maintain your balance. And here's the thing: no one talks about what they've seen and heard. No one talks about their loss. What is so striking is the utter loneliness people feel in their grief. How to get people to realize that they've experienced trauma, that they've been altered by their loss. And that it's okay. This film is a small attempt to get people to open up, to share their stories, to realize that they're not alone in their grief, in their disorientation, in their despair and in their anger.
Learning Areas:
Administer health education strategies, interventions and programsDiversity and culture
Planning of health education strategies, interventions, and programs
Learning Objectives:
Describe the profound grief and anger and disorientation in the wake of losing someone to street violence.
Demonstrate that the street violence deeply impacts not only youth but also adults, and in this case adults who have had great success in life.
You'll have to excuse me, but I'm not accustommed to such directives in writing. In the end, I made this film because in my time writing about the violence of our cities it has struck me that no one talks about loss. No one, it seems, is allowed to grieve. In fact, there's a myth out there that somehow people get accustommed if not hardened to the violence, and yet I would argue that it's one single act of violence around which the rest of a childhood will revolve. Our hope with this film is that it would give people -- especially young people -- license to talk about their grief, about their disorientation, about their anger, about feeling completely alone. Our hope was that by juxtaposing the experience of some young people with that of some NBA players it would make it okay to talk about the trauma of losing someone close to you to violence.
Keyword(s): Public health or related education
Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I've been reporting on urban violence for 25 years. My work includes my book There Are No Children Here, my film The Interrupters, my radio documentary Harper High (on This American Life) and numerous magazine and newspaper pieces.
Any relevant financial relationships? No
I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.