A Moment of Choice: Chaos or Community

Human nature, it seems, imposes meaning onto chaos. Something happens like an accident, a birth in a family when another member dies, or a storm, and we create a narrative around it. We look for causes or justifications. We live in a state of uncertainty, not knowing if we are acting freely, subject to randomness, or moving within an unknowable celestial plan.

There’s another level at which we operate, usually subconsciously, that affects our lives and those around us. This is the universe of our perceptions of each other and the world. Understanding where a sense of chaos originates within ourselves and for others is the key to overcoming it in thought and action.

When we perceive disorder, regardless of the truth, history shows us that we either take direct action ourselves to remedy it, or call for outside help – for some, it could be praying for divine intervention – when we feel the issue is outside our control. We have a choice.

It is in this context that I reflect on the fifth anniversary of the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by a white police officer who pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck over an excruciatingly long eight minutes and forty-six seconds. To me, this act, like hundreds of others that #saytheirnames exposes, is emblematic of a society that fears and mistrusts its own people, bypassing direct engagement with one another and instead relying on intermediaries. Where some perceive chaos, others like myself see a crisis of faith in our neighbors.

For many white Americans, George Floyd was a moment of clarity about the depth of racism in this country. In Chicago’s northern suburbs, individuals and groups organized and effected reforms, as I will describe in this essay. But other people perceived themselves to be unjustly disadvantaged by these actions. Nationally, a majority of voters re-elected President Donald Trump, who is doubling down on an agenda fueled by fear, centered on militarization and erecting literal and legally sanctioned walls of exclusion.

I believe the only way out of this chaos is by using the act of remembering George Floyd in the same way that Jews communally relive the exodus from slavery to freedom every year on Passover. We must remind ourselves that democracy – that is, trust in one another – is harder but more imperative than the imposition of force. We are human beings and as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said repeatedly, we must learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools.

This essay is my own act of remembrance. I look back over the last five years and share what I feel is the root of the psychology that leads too many of us to mistrust and oppress one another, and what we can do.

Since May 25, 2020

In the midst of the pandemic, two groups, Winnetka Walks Against Racism and Healing Everyday Racism in Our Schools, or HEROS, generated a remarkable turnout of over 4,000 people on the Winnetka Village Green just weeks after Floyd’s murder. I was there, and in that predominantly white and affluent suburb, I heard middle-of-the-road elected officials, business, civic, and religious leaders join young people of color in using pointed terms that were employed by people on the political Left like “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” Together, they pledged to be introspective and change the status quo.

I seized the moment myself and wrote in this Patch column that racial discrimination in housing had to be addressed if we were going to make any progress in trusting, rather than policing or excluding, people of color. Through housing policy we “can shape a local ethos of welcoming Black neighbors of all incomes and stop the nonsense of treating anyone who is not white or rich as ‘other.’”

Indeed at every level of government since then, officials scrutinized their policies and practices for ways in which people of color were either intentionally or inadvertently harmed more than whites. Within months of George Floyd’s murder, former President Barack Obama issued a Reimagining Policing Pledge as “a call for mayors and local officials to review and reform use of force policies, redefine public safety, and combat systemic racism within law enforcement.” Several northern suburbs such as Evanston and Skokie cited this pledge and demands from their own residents as they revamped their policing practices.

In housing, we saw several mostly white and affluent northern suburbs like Deerfield, Northbrook, and Park Ridge approve new affordable or mixed-income residential developments or, in the case of Northbrook, adopt inclusionary zoning, enshrining mixed-income housing as a policy. Wilmette worked with Community Partners for Affordable Housing on a creative use of $1.6 million from developer Optima to purchase and keep affordable in perpetuity fifteen single-family homes. By popular demand, Wilmette also reconstituted its Housing Commission and Human Relations Commission.

Evanston, which since the Civil War “both supported and created systems to segregate, limit, deny, and control Black citizens,” became the first city in the nation to institute a reparations program, albeit narrowly tailored to housing. Native Americans approached Skokie to redesign the image on its Village Seal.

School communities in Evanston and Skokie also organized, such as the Abolition Coalition and the Skokie Schools Equity Collaborative, to advocate for nonviolent alternatives to “community resource officers” inside schools.

Many residents specifically cited George Floyd in deciding to throw their hats in ring and run for office in the 2021 and 2025 cycles. Two thus inspired from Skokie made history. Keith Robinson, an Associate Principal at Evanston Township High School, “wanted to do something more” and became the first Black Trustee. James Johnson, a young white teacher and former Catholic Worker, said, “As Americans, we should be so proud of how Black Lives Matter has evolved into an international, human rights movement. It has invigorated activists across the globe, myself included.” Johnson’s election as the first independent to serve as Skokie Trustee since the mid-‘60s gave the impetus to an electoral reform movement (which I chaired) that opened up the entire system to more candidates and accountability to voters.

Candidates for City Council or Village Board in other northern suburbs also made history as “firsts”: Black Trustees of Northbrook (Joy Ebhomielen) and Wilmette (Gerry Smith); Latino City Council Member of Highland Park (Andrés Tapia); Muslim woman Trustee of Morton Grove (Saba Khan); Cambodian Trustee of Skokie (Khem Khoeun); and Indian American Lincolnwood Mayor and Trustee (Jesal Patel and Mohammed Saleem).

This period also saw the emergence of groups pushing back, such as Moms for Liberty and Awake Illinois, which have run candidates for school and library boards against what they view as government interference in parental choice. But by and large, race- and LGBTQ+-conscious equity candidates have prevailed, as in Niles Township District 219, which covers Golf, Lincolnwood, Morton Grove, Skokie and parts of Glenview and Niles.

Diversity among our elected officials matters because no one group holds a patent on what constitutes a good life, and yet the community is a shared whole: e pluribus unum, out of many, one. I would frame the debate on governance as a fulcrum balanced on trust: do we believe that we can solve our problems through an inclusive democratic political realm, or do we believe we need to throw our lot in an extra-political leader?

“A failure of moral alertness”

We can begin to understand this fulcrum through one of the most familiar stories in Western culture: the biblical Exodus. It is fascinating on three levels. We see the Israelite people delivered to freedom from enslavement by the external force of a divinity, God. We also see these people, still used to slavery, awashed in fear and doubt while in the wilderness who fashion and worship a “golden calf” while their leader Moses is on Mount Sinai for forty days bargaining with God not to destroy them.

Although God exacted punishment, ensuring that by wandering for forty years, only the generation born in freedom would enter Canaan, God gave people a choice: to govern themselves through a code of moral responsibility, or forever live in the wilds. Divided and flawed as they were, they chose to accept, in fits and starts, a political covenant that Moses brought to them, binding them to each other. By an act of free will, “all the people answered together.” (Exodus 19:8)

“Exodus politics,” as Michael Walzer demonstrates in Exodus and Revolution, is powerful precisely because it is about politics, not an act of grace. The Sinai covenant is “radically contingent” (“if ye will obey my voice indeed…” in Exodus 19:5). It has “less to do with the past performances of God than in the future performances of the people.” Jews are called to remember their enslavement and deliverance every year to appreciate both freedom and the responsibility that goes with it – a responsibility to avoid a “failure of moral alertness” that leads back to causing or experiencing oppression.

The yearning for a messiah – a second Exodus – took hold generations later as the Hebrews did not, in fact, experience the land of milk and honey as they had hoped. It felt to them like a broken promise.

I see echoes of this in the “broken windows theory” of sociologist James Q. Wilson that took hold in the early 1980s about why crime perpetuates in urban areas. Wilson observed that when people see broken windows that are never fixed or other nuisances like littering or loitering, they perceive that the entire social contract has broken down and it incites crime. The only answer, in their minds, is some kind of force outside themselves that can bring order to chaos – which in this case is more police.

Wilson argues here and in Thinking About Crime (1975) that we need to recognize these seemingly minor annoyances as a “collapse of informal social controls” rather than ignore them. This perception of collapse in itself incites crime. The way to do this, he posited, is to simultaneously build inter-community relationships and to reintroduce beat cops as a sort of catalyst for “nonpolice methods for reducing street crime.” But what too many government bodies took from his work – a misreading in my opinion – is that we need more police, period. A beat cop and organized neighbors will certainly help, but so will the political drive to ensure that no neighborhood is allowed to suffer neglect.

This also means reinvesting in communities where government and financial insitutions deliberately siphoned resources away from Black neighborhoods through redlining and a reduction of services. Those windows also stayed broken because there was no political will to push the owner to fix them.

We are at a moment of choice.

What seems like anarchic chaos – unfixed windows, unanswered prayers – is really a reflection of a breakdown in social relationships. Violence, including state-sponsored violence, only incites more violence. When we stop trusting, we build gated communities. We create a culture that atomizes people, one that reminds me of George Tooker’s 1950 painting, Subway.

We can choose to forge relationships with people not like ourselves and work together to heal the world; or we can choose to relinquish our power to an external force, move, or retreat into ourselves. Dr. King called it a choice between chaos and community, between “nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.”

We have a covenant of our own in the United States. The Constitution calls upon us to form “a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Providing for the common defense is neither the first nor the sole purpose of our democracy.

If we are to turn the tragedy of George Floyd’s death into something positive, it is to recognize that only by including all, by observing the simple commandment of loving thy neighbor, can we save ourselves.