History Repeats Itself...22 Times and Counting

I've seen this kind of outrage before but for the purposes of this diatribe I would like to go to a couple of weeks before the most profound event of my teenage life. I was standing in the parking lot at Gately Stadium with a friend from another high school. We were checking out the girls, wondering where the rest of our friends were. It's funny now at forty years old going back in my mind to 1984...

Ben Wilson was a phenom. He had a tremendous presence on any basketball court he played on, the ladies loved him and he went to my rival school. Chicago Vocational and Simeon Vocational shared the distinction of being the hardscrabble south side schools. Blue collar places of learning. Simeon happened to have the best basketball player in the US at the time and we didn't - not too far away from being horrible but better than everybody except "The Meon". Ben Wilson was 17 when he was killed. His kid was 10 months old and the city mourned in a very quiet outrage.

Sam and I were in the parking lot at Gately and I think Chicago Vocational played Hyde Park Career Academy in football that night. Ben Wilson walked past and one of us spoke and to my surprise he stopped. Now I know that people like to gloss over the reputations of people while alive and especially when they aren't around - to be certain. Benji's rep was that of a super dare I say Uber star. Nonetheless he stopped. We would have a conversation with him that now sounded like a goodbye...in the amber of Chicago's streetlights, Ben Wilson talked about all of the things a Senior in high school talks about. It was a conversation that would become a part of the grief I feel still 24 years later. My aunt would tell me that when we were very little kids Ben and I played together on south Champlain...I wish I could've known that when we were in that parking lot October 1994.

On Tuesday in downtown Chicago a rally was held in response to the alarming number of deaths of Chicago Public School students since January (22 - 20 from gun violence) and the lack of Gun control laws in the state of Illinois. Check this out from the New York Times written by Ira Berkow (a great writer) in 1993.

Three days after the shooting, at a wake in the school gym on Friday, members of Congress, state senators, Mayor Harold Washington and college basketball coaches like Joey Meyer of DePaul and Lou Henson of Illinois, who had hoped to recruit Wilson, were among the 8,000 people who stood in line in the cold outside, then filed past Wilson's coffin, which was strewn with flowers.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson spoke at Wilson's funeral. He called for gun control and it brought cheers from the mourners. "But his demands that parents take responsibility for their children brought foot-stomping agreement and deafening applause," The Chicago Tribune reported.

Mary Wilson, Ben's mother, would go before the Chicago City Council and appeal for gun control and an end to gang violence. The council listened and promised action. "Nothing really was done," she later recalled.

Police statistics in 1984 showed that 119 young people between the ages of 11 and 20 had been murdered in Chicago by the end of October. Wilson's death was one of more that increased that figure. Similar numbers were recorded in cities across the country.

It pains me that in 2008 the message of that tragedy is lost on young people and that my friends is our fault. If you were in or graduated from high school in 1984/1985 you know I am correct. The murder of Ben Wilson made the entire city promise to do something and now we stand in the wake of those hollow promises. Twenty two dead in 2008 so far...119 between 11 and 20 before October in 1984. We swore that we would change things. During the rally held Wednesday, students from ironically Simeon the site of the most recent shooting -demanded that the rash of violence stop. It must stop and the demand for gun control legislation in 2008 is as loud as it was in 1984.

In thinking about that evening in the parking lot, I realize that Ben was changing...maturing. I didn't know that his kid was 10 months at the time. I remember him mentioning that he looked forward to college. He really loved his kid...many focus on the basketball player. I like remembering that evening when I met the man.

If we don't change history we are doomed to repeat it and that is our karmic payback. Please join me in finding a viable solution to this horrendous problem. It shouldn't require a world class athlete in high school to be murdered to get people - hell an entire city up in arms.

Ben Wilson was one of 119 young people murdered in Chicago prior to October in 1984. In 2007, there were 267 shootings involving children under the age of 16 in Chicago, up from 247 the previous year.

This is an epidemic in no uncertain terms.