In America, we’re lucky. When the violence in Ukraine gets too upsetting, we can turn off the television, find some playful diversion and pretend against all current evidence that humankind has progressed since the dawning of civilization.
In Baltimore, it’s a little more complicated. We can turn off the television, but not the noise down the street: the gunfire, the bodies going down, the mothers weeping over fallen children.
And in response to another weekend’s gun violence, the overmatched mayor of Baltimore, Brandon Scott, offering “hearts and prayers.”
It’s the best he’s got.
Such empty, ineffectual words sound like a statement of surrender after so much gunplay and so much opportunity to find words that might actually mean something to emotionally rattled citizens.
Eleven weeks into 2022, it’s clear the city’s headed for another year of 300 or more homicides. Sunday morning’s newspaper reported eight recent shootings that left eight wounded and three dead. At that point, the weekend was only half over.
We have legions of suburbanites now who declare they’ll “never go downtown again.”
The answer to such anxiety has always been an attempt to offer perspective. Like all cities, Baltimore is more than one city. There are safe, thriving neighborhoods, and there are dangerous ones. If you live here, you don’t need a roadmap to figure out where it’s safe to go.
But then comes last Friday, March 18, two o’clock in the afternoon in South Baltimore’s Otterbein neighborhood, on the 500 block of South Charles Street, where residents heard five gunshots and found two young men lying wounded in the street.
This is two blocks from the Inner Harbor that Baltimoreans once embraced as a proud symbol of the city’s rejuvenation. Not anymore we don’t. History has passed it by, and City Hall slept through its decay.
But it’s not just nearness of the Inner Harbor that’s disturbing. As it happens, this area of South Baltimore, southwest of the harbor, is one of the city’s genuine signs of promise. The nearby Otterbein neighborhood’s as charming as any in town. The whole Federal Hill area’s as hip and lively as anywhere.
I walk through there a lot, since my daughter lives down there and, for several years, my son lived in nearby Locust Point.
You walk through either area and see not only today’s Baltimore but — hopefully — tomorrow’s. The streets are bustling with people of every race and age and every economic background, with restaurants and shops and taverns and the transformed Cross Street Market. On home dates for the nearby Ravens and Orioles, the spillover into the neighborhoods makes it feel like an extended street party.
But then comes Friday’s shootings.
Two o’clock, middle of the afternoon.
Two people hospitalized.
A neighborhood suddenly feeling unanticipated anxiety.
And a mayor who has good intentions but not a single idea beyond the clichés we’ve heard for decades now, while the gun violence continues, and the city’s population shrinks, and suburbanites turn their heads away.
And the best we can tell ourselves is: Well, at least we don’t live in Ukraine.
Michael Olesker’s newest book, “Boogie: Life on A Merry-Go-Round,” will be published this spring. It’s the life story of Baltimore legend Leonard “Boogie” Weinglass,an original “Diner” guy who grew up to create the Merry-Go-Round clothing chain and donate millions to charity.
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