Adam Toledo Shooting - Chicago, IL

[45dotACP]

@RevolverRob Rob what’s your take on the average Chicago resident on this?

Chicago is a tough town, with tough people. Is it possible they’ll see this as too bad so sad, and while tragic, not necessarily rise to the outrage of burning the city down and hot footing off with Nike’s and Flat Screens?

Not Rob, but to the average resident of Little Village, it's the cost of doing crime. For the average Chicagoan, he's hardly the youngest or most innocent to die in the pursuit of that lifestyle.

We've had gang members abduct and murder the children of other gang members, hell during the Adam Toledo case we had a dude initiate a road rage shootout with the grandchild of his girlfriend in their vehicle and said kid took a bullet to the head.

Want my Southside theory?

The people who gave a shit about Adam Toledo when he was alive sure could've used the help of all the people who apparently care so deeply for his young precious life now, but the number of people who cared genuinely about him was probably fewer than zero. Almost everyone who cares about this case is either selling something or trying to keep their job.

I suspect It'll follow the usual pattern of protest to riot to looting...save a few wildcards...The hipster neighborhoods (wicker park, logan square etc) may make an autonomous zone in front of Lori Lightfoots house or whatever, and there might be riots in or nearby a police precinct, but something that was overlooked was that the Latino street gangs were tolerant of extremely little bullshit regarding the George Floyd riots, and Little Village, their home, was almost totally unmolested by BLM "protestors" under the threat of some serious violence.

As in my coworkers from that neighborhood showed me videos of confrontations where the usual "Antifa" crowd was met by a few Very Angry Latinos (with weapons) and the nature of peaceful protest was explored.

Their gig is protection as much as it is crime and rioters coming in and busting the place up is going to make them look bad so the neighborhood is going to know this. Riots or looting may occur in other neighborhoods or downtown though.



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[AKDoug]

Very few people can look at themselves in a mirror and accept that they're the bad guy- and less can accept being told that by someone else.

Very astute and well said. Every single person I've fired from my business has had this exact problem. It seems that no amount of counseling and kindness I applied helped, nor did being a hard ass with them.

[Totem Polar]

On tangent: I had a pocket knife by age 8. That was pretty standard among my peer group.

But, hell, we also brought guns to school, and nobody cared-so long as it was in season (deer, chukar, whatever).

[Maple Syrup Actual]

Very few people can look at themselves in a mirror and accept that they're the bad guy- \

I was hanging out with one of my closest friends last summer; we've been friends since were were around 16. I asked him something I'd been thinking about a lot: "when did you realize we were the bad guys?"

We definitely were, too. We stole, we cheated, we used drugs and vandalized stuff and were total miscreants. It was totally socially acceptable in our scene to own nothing that wasn't stolen. If you had something valuable that was stolen, that would have been seen as laudable, not shameful. But at the time we were convinced that everyone else was the real bad guys...that every football coach was a child molester, every successful athlete was a rapist, every cop was crooked.

It was much later that I realized this was a myth. Yes, there are football coaches that are child molesters...but it's super rare. Most successful athletes are just super motivated, talented people. Most cops hate corruption - that's why they're cops. But when we were young, we were literally counter-culture, not in the way that hippies were, but for real. We were anti-civilization. But we didn't think of ourselves as evil, we thought we were less evil than everyone else, and that the ideals of community and safety and warmth were all just facades. We didn't think the ideas were wrong, we thought that the proponents were lying.

I now realize that most of us, most of my friends I mean, were just the products of broken homes and we all had really warped ideas about the kind of treatment we could expect from the world. But it took me a really long time to figure that out. It didn't help that that kind of thinking is glamourized in pop culture; for some reason the example that springs to mind is the Stepford Wives, where the supposed pillars of the community have these brainwashed wives, but there are a million examples of this in pop culture. Of course now I see what a fantasy that all is; rooted in jealousy and bitterness, it drives people like the person I was as a kid insane and they refuse to accept that the all-star high school quarterback is also smart, and also nice, and also happy. You just can't face that possibility, because then what are you? You don't have some secret knowledge. You haven't got the real moral high ground. You're just trash. But that's the reality. We were the bad guys, we just didn't know it.

My friend had never come to that realization, and it silenced him for a long time. Eventually he just said, "holy shit, we were the bad guys."

Interestingly (or I think so anyway) all of us eventually became highly productive people. Well, when I say all of us, I mean everyone I chose to keep close to me; there was a larger scene of people who even at the time I thought were complete scum and basically all of them ended up in a bad way, as heavy drug addicts, career criminals, inpatient mental health cases, and homeless people. Or just dead, lots are dead. But the half-dozenish people I considered actual friends all ended up being pretty healthy people, it just took a longer time to get there.



Anyway I guess the point of all that is that yeah, nobody thinks they're the bad guys, even though from the outside it's painfully obvious.

[peterb]

Anyway I guess the point of all that is that yeah, nobody thinks they're the bad guys, even though from the outside it's painfully obvious.

Thank you for that.

The 20-year-old may have thought he was teaching the 13-year-old how to survive on the streets....

[blues]

I didn't realize I was heading down the road to being a bad guy until a teacher took the time, treated me with respect I had never known and helped me realize that I didn't have to be like the kids I ran with and emulated who were doing all the sorts of things that would have prevented me wearing a badge and achieving a modicum of success at being a human being.

(It wasn't an overnight success, but the seed was firmly planted, and though it was sometimes, (okay often), a struggle, I mostly overcame what might have been a very negative heading in life.)

It's a very fine line. Maybe that's why I was so good at interrogating defendants, my own as well as for other agents who requested me to conduct their interviews for them.

[Totem Polar]

The guy who used to head up the international Goju organization that I trained with as a youngster had a saying that I had on my wall for a while, loosely: “there is so much bad in the best of us and so much good in the worst of us that it’s often hard to tell who should be judging who.”

With the exception of outliers like a couple of dedicated old church ladies on one side, and some Ed Geins on the other, I still think there’s some truth to that.

As an aside, this guy was an awesome karate-ka. I absolutely looked up to him. He was also a 7 times all-Marine Corps and 3 times all-service Judo champion, as well as an olympic alternate on the judo team in 1964, and all-Okinawa champion. And Judo was his *second* martial art, after heading up a Goju org that had dojos all over the US and in several other countries.

But I digress.

[RevolverRob]

Peak of 1000 gathered. Marched along blocking a few streets. No major issues, they antagonized the cops in a few places. Surrounded a police car when the police arrested someone, but were soon pushed back.

No rioting, no looting.

This is what I expected. BLM and Antifa have painted themselves into a corner. Where their "moral high grounds" are based entirely on racial identity and not actually on the actions they propose to disapprove of.

The problem with Adam Toledo is, he was the wrong color. They simply can't manufacture the same outrage for this as they can if Adam had been black.

[HeavyDuty]

Yep. That's why the local gang I came up around, the Centurions, had their Junior Centurions...though I didn't realize what the catch was early on...in grade school.

Jeez, Blues - I knew you were old, but you must be ancient.

[blues]

We didn't even have that fancy stuff in my day.