The New Yorker, February 2, 2017: CHICAGO’S VIOLENCE AND TRUMP’S OMINOUS TWEETS
“This past November, a fifteen-year-old boy named Javon Wilson was shot and killed over a pair of sneakers. Danny Davis, a congressman whose district includes the city’s West Side, was Javon’s grandfather. At his grandson’s funeral, Davis, in a remarkable display of forgiveness, asked friends and family to think about the shooter and his family. ‘Not only do I grieve for my family,’ Davis, in a deep baritone, told those who had assembled, ‘but I am so grateful the Lord has given me the spirit to grieve for the young man who pulled the trigger. So parents, family, and friends, let us be able to reach out.’ He said that he received calls of condolence from many public officials, including Trump, who was then the President-elect. I spoke with Congressman Davis the other day, and he seemed unfazed by Trump’s tweet directed at his city. ‘I’m not a Quick Draw McGraw,’ he told me, suggesting that Trump was looking for a quick fix to a complicated problem. ‘He is what he is. He likes to tweet.’ Davis then took a detour, telling me how he had come to Chicago from a small town in Arkansas, in 1961, a month out of college and in need of work. ‘I came here with the idea that I’d arrive on Saturday and be working on Monday,’ he told me. This personal history was his way of suggesting that the root of violence in the city is its profound generational poverty, and that the federal government could do well to address that distress.”