Written by Rabbi Philip Posner   

President Obama, when Mayor Emanuel welcomes you back to Chicago this weekend it’s time for you to agree: the National Guard is required!
In May of 2011, I and other “Freedom Riders” were honored to be on the Oprah Winfrey show. I was truly impressed with what a beautiful city Chicago is.
It is with a heavy heart, I now admit, like too many Americans I extolled the marvels of stone and roses while ignoring its bloodshed.
Two weeks ago, Shirley Chambers a Chicago mother went to the morgue for the fourth time. In 1995, a 16-year-old boy fatally shot her 18-year-old son, Carlos, on a sidewalk in the South Loop. Then her 23-year-old son, Jerome, was shot to death outside their housing complex. Two months earlier, a 13-year-old boy gunned down her 15-year-old daughter, LaToya. Last weekend she lost her last child –33 year old – Ronnie Chambers.
While the current pleas for assault weapons legislation are commendable, it is the proliferation of pistols that is destroying our urban youth. I said our “urban youth,” but that is not true is it? Most white Americans don’t see Shirley Chambers’ children as “our own,” or the 3,371 individuals who from 2003 to 2011 were murdered in Chicago of which “98% were from a handgun.”
Does anyone believe that if white children were being slaughtered at that rate there would not be outrage?
President Obama and Mayor Emanuel, I don’t doubt the suffering you feel for the blood of America’s youth that stains the streets of America’s cities. But, while better enforcement, gun laws, investing in our children all have a role to end this carnage, those things alone are too late- and you know it.
The only way to stop the immediate carnage is for you to call on units of the National Guard who have been trained in the complexities of an urban environment. With clearly defined strategies of conduct, they should be used to work with and help the local police in those sections of our cities where gang violence and murder is out of control.
How many more families are you both going to hug at their loved one’s funerals before you and all the mayors of our large cities own up to the fact that their lives are as precious as the Afghanistan’s citizens and children, for whom America’s soldiers are shedding their blood?
I believe that you know better than I that there are few problems in society that are simple to solve. To quote a Freedom Rider colleague of mine, “we (also) need to address the roots of violence in our communities with programs that raise hope-inspire and empower our young people and institutions….” I submit we can do both – alleviate murder and mayhem and confront the lethal mix of drugs and greed borne out of the systemic hopelessness and desperation that so many of our ghetto youth feel from the day of their birth to their premature death.
When it comes to the preservation of life, you won’t be the first to opt for drastic action. President Lincoln did so during the “Draft Riots in New Your city, 7/13-16/1863, that claimed the lives of an estimated 100 black citizens. In 1957 President Eisenhower had the courage to do so, to protect the lives of nine African American High School students in Little Rock, Arkansas.
The two of you, know better than most of us that behind the walls of our large cities where so many African Americans feel isolated and alone, gangs feel free to intimidate, murder and maim. Mr. President, “tear down” those walls and help put an end to this carnage.
At the Newtown Memorial Service you declared, for the death of twenty children and seven adults, “I’ll use whatever power this office holds…in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this.”
Since you spoke those words, more than 50 fellow human beings have been murdered in Chicago, where last year’s gang-connected violence excelled 18 times the number in Newtown, where “since 2001 Chicago has recorded more than 5,000 gun-related deaths, compared with the 2,000 American military deaths in the war in Afghanistan.”*
Tragedies! I believe you have the power and the courage to transform your words “enough is enough,” to l’chaim – for life!
Philip M. Posner, Rabbi
*Understanding Kids, Gangs and Guns, by Sudhir Venkatesh, 10/3/2012 N.Y. Times
Rabbi Philip M. Posner, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , lives in Santa Cruz, Calif. and Puerto Vallarta Mexico. In 1961, a Freedom Rider, he served 39 days in Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi. He is the author of Food for Thought, Character and Soul – Recipes and Blessings Included.