What To Do About Chicago

To My Fraternity Brother Trumaine:

I know you are very upset about the violence in Chicago. I am from there and I am too. You said you were convinced that no one had a solution to it. Always remember, Trumaine – anything that is essential is possible. Justice is essential in the eyes of the Lord. So is righteousness, order, and peace; therefore, they are possible. There is a solution, bruh – but the solution has not been found because no one that I have heard speak on these matters has a good grasp on what the problem is. All this time, the powers that be in Chicago have pursued the violence in Chicago as a social problem – a social ill, if you will – and they have espoused social repairs. More police, enforced curfews, anti-gang task forces, midnight basketball, community policing, after school programs, anti-gun campaigns, etc.

A person with a bad strep throat has a microbiological problem; that is, they are infected with strep. Their problem is actualized biochemically as toxins from the germ cause one’s temperature to rise. It is experienced environmentally – that is, you get a fever and feel hot. Yet no one treats strep throat by putting afflicted people into walk-in freezers to cool them down. That would be malpractice. Merely increasing police presence and social programs (as the city is now doing) is malpractice too. It is the treating of the symptom rather than the disease itself. In this case, you have to treat Chicago’s root spiritual pathology, and to do that, you have to know what its spiritual anatomy and physiology is.

Chicago, as you know, was founded by a black man, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, near the point where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan. He founded it as a trading point. The good Lord purposes land for a certain use and need, Trumaine – this one, to be a port city, that one to be a city of culture and learning. Chicago was, and still is, a trade city. It was placed where it was to be used to buy, sell, and trade and bless and sustain its people and help grow and populate a future nation.

Then came the devil. The buying, selling, and trading went from fur pelts to cocaine and heroin. The populating went from intact families to overcrowded families perverted in ghettos by poverty, racism, and out-of-wedlock birth. The devil has taken over the land and the blessed apparatus of commerce and trade imprinted on it for his evil purposes. A spirit of murder inhabits the city now. “How,” you ask, “does such a spirit take hold in a city?” The pattern I have seen throughout America is that the spirit of murder is the evil spawn of corrupt political leaders abiding systematic injustice (especially racial), and nowhere is this more the case than Chicago. Having grown up in the “apartheid state” of Chicago, in the "Bantustan" of the South Side, I know well how much red lining, racial partitioning of communities, police brutality, and zoning black communities as de facto drug bazaars have been aided, abetted, and ignored by effete, cowardly, duplicitous, and self-serving political leaders who have given lip-service to civil rights but have “Tommed out” in the chambers of city hall and the board rooms and sitting rooms of the rich and powerful. This environment is a “red carpet” entry way for the spirit of Murder.

When a person is sick and feverish from a sore throat, the cure comes in three stages. First, you identify the etiological agent (Strep, for instance). Next, the doctor requests provision of the remedy (penicillin) from the pharmacy. Finally, the patient devises and executes a financial plan to procure it (to pay for the penicillin at the pharmacy.) The same applies here. We have identified the offending agent killing Chicago’s citizens. It is the Spirit of Murder. Now, the city has to request the provision of the remedy. But this remedy can’t be found at Walgreens.

“I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

– Matthew 16:19

And Jesus rebuked him, and the demon came out of him, and the boy was cured at once. Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, “Why could we not drive it out?” And He said to them, “Because of the littleness of your faith; for truly I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you. But this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.”

– Matthew 17:18-21

Removing this spirit is going to require prayer and fasting. And it is going to have to be sustained prayer and fasting, not merely an event. (Listen to Pastor Tony Evans speak about fasting.) I fasted a few weeks ago for something and God fixed it so quickly, I thought I had ordered Jimmy Johns…LOL!) It will require the whole city’s participation – a Grant Park deal, with a satellite prayer site at Pioneer Court just north of the Chicago River on the east side of Michigan Avenue by the Tribune building where DuSable had his first trading post. It needs to be led by two men of good Christian report (one white and one black) and one woman – an old, black woman that nobody knows, who does nothing but pray night and day. The people are going to have to fast everything – food (for as long as is Godly wisdom directs), eating out, movies, sex, alcohol, weed, the whole shebang – for say, a week. Not only will this put the devil on notice, but it will activate the Holy Spirit, and let God know that, at long last, the people are truly and earnestly ready for a move toward Him and a change in their circumstances. But that won’t move the politicians and the powerful much. They will be moved by the last stage – when you pay for, pick up, and take “the medicine.”

The “medicine” is composed of three pills. The first “pill” to be taken coming out of this fasting and prayer period is that no citizen of Chicago, Illinois should cast their vote for ANY elected incumbent municipal, county, or federal politician, in ANY office, under ANY circumstance, for ANY reason unless the murder rate in the city falls by a MINIMUM of 25% in the 365 days following the decree, with a recalibrating of the goal every year. Tom Daschle, the former US Senator and Senate Majority Leader from South Dakota said that when politiicians “feel the heat, they see the light.” Chicago’s leaders really haven’t felt the heat, most notably the Mayor, who has largely been shielded from consequence by City Council sycophants who are intimidated by him and accountable to him. When you defibrillate a heart, every single moveable sodium and potassium stand at attention and return to their baseline locale. They focus. The city leaders need to be defibrillated – it will reset them, get their attention, and force them to work together since they will all rise or fall together.

The second pill is a legislative pill. This pill will cost about $100 million. One of the practical reasons why so many black men are getting killed in America is because it doesn’t matter if they live. In America, Trumaine, there are two (and only two) groups of black people - “worthless” black people and black people who are “worth less.” Worthless black folk comprise about a third of all black Americans. (Read “Beyond Broke”, a white paper from Global Policy Solutions, on this.) These are Blacks who have a net worth of $200 or less. Many of them have a negative net worth. Harith Augustus, who got shot in the back running from the po-po a few weeks ago in South Shore, and LaQuan McDonald, a lost, high soul staggering into the streetlit orange night of Chicago to his doom are just two of many nameless and faceless examples in the city. Then there are folks like you and me, who may have a net worth, but our net worth is “worth less” than whites similarly situated. You know when you are talking to white co-workers or making conversation with white people who you know make either the same amount of money you make, or less, and they start talking about their summer homes and boats that you don’t have, and exotic travel to places you have never been? That’s when you know you are “worth less.” This has profound implications for the lives of black people. Consider the last mosquito you killed on the back of your neck this summer. You felt it merely touch you and you “murdered” it - sight unseen, without compunction, compassion, or apology. Now consider that, in the richest nation on Earth, one third of the people that look like you and me have about the same net worth as that mosquito. What is worse is that there are no hoards of white supremacists roaming through Black neighborhoods killing these folks; it is black people who have embraced their own absolute or relative worthlessness and are behaving accordingly, literally killing each other like flies.

People don’t kill flies just because they are annoying. Kids, parents, pets, neighbors, co-workers, bosses can be annoying, but they aren’t getting gunned down like black people in Chicago. People kill flies because they are annoying deemed worthless. So as long as black people lack appropriate and just worth, they will be treated accordingly in any locale where “the strongman” is the Murder Spirit.

Black people must be assigned a worth and it must be backed by real dollars. That is where the $100 million dollars comes in. There should be a standing reward paid to any person who provides material information leading to the arrest and conviction of any murder victim who is a citizen of Chicago - $25,000 for any adult and $100,000 for any child under 18. In addition, the citizens of Chicago should set a goal to insure every citizen’s life for a minimum of $25,000. This would add $22 billion dollars of net worth to black life over the next 100 or so years, but would cost far less. This is the third “pill.” With insurance like this, black life would matter indeed.

Black people in Chicago are, in the aggregate, about $92 billion dollars behind their white counterparts in the net worth arena. ($104,000 net worth gap from the “Beyond Broke” paper multiplied by the approximately 888,000 black citizens of Chicago.) Therefore, my brother, you need to ABANDON ALL HOPE that black people’s fortunes in Chicago (or anywhere else in America) can change demonstrably and persistently until that situation changes. This is but one of the reasons I speak and write so insistently and fervently about Reparations for the descendants of American slaves of African descent.

"So where would the money come from?", you ask. From the state, the county, the city, the insurance industry, the wealthy, the blessed. But ultimately, it would come from the will of the people to demand it, from whatever good Spirit the good Lord would see fit to replace the the Murder Spirit with. We receive not because we ask not.

I have more details and components to my plan, but in the end, Chicago doesn’t need my man-made, so-called “clever plans” as much as it needs faith – the faith to come before the Lord with humility and respect, seeking to do His will and glorify Him through just and Godly action that calls to account the unjust, the cowardly, and the self-serving. What I know is that if the people take one step, the Lord will take many. Pray and fast for change, and in the immortal words of the great philosopher Childish Gambino, “black man, git dat munny…”

Fraternally Yours,

Darryl L.Fortson, M.D.