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No
Sense
I
didn’t want to write about the triple homicide on my street
this week. We writers sometimes jump too quickly to trying
to make meaning and sort patterns out of the truly awful things
that happen around us, and we run the risk of using that to
move past the part where we acknowledge the horror and the
grief faced by the friends and family of those involved.
The details of this case, at least as much as we know now,
seem designed to keep us from putting this crime into our
usual explanatory boxes for murder—robbery, fight, jealousy,
gang, money, revenge. So far, the Times Union’s account
of Javon Underdue’s confession describes a evening among friends,
except that Underdue began thinking about everything wrong
in his life, worked himself into a rage, and shot three people.
This narrative feels wrong, partial (and it may well be).
As meaning-making beings, it’s hard to face the idea that
the barrier between “normal” and “murder” is so thin. There’s
no weighty ballast of motive here to anchor our anxiety with.
It’s very hard to not want to put more meaning onto it, to
create a rationale, a reason, and especially to identify something
someone could have done to prevent it. And there may well
be those things—gun control comes to my mind as a candidate.
But sometimes that rush to find “a reason” can have unintended
side effects.
It’s not just writers who do it. Everyone who hears about
a crime like this jumps to slot it into what they know or
believe about the demographics of the people involved, the
neighborhood, and any other circumstances surrounding the
event. In this case, particularly the neighborhood. Last week,
some reporters were asking passersby how this made them feel
on the street. Note that they didn’t ask if it made people
feel uncomfortable around stoned, drunk, or depressed people—and
nor should they have.
Not that they needed to ask to plant the idea that such a
crime casts a pall for blocks and blocks. If this had been
a on-the-street shooting, a bystander shot during a drug deal
or something, they would have a point. A murder like this,
committed by someone who knows the victim in an act of very
personal violence, as awful as it is, is something that happens,
rarely thank God, but reliably, everywhere, in every class,
race, and neighborhood.
And yet, when something like this happens in Delmar, it is
not blamed on Delmar. But when it happens in a city neighborhood,
it is. Even when the police are being pretty clear that it
doesn’t seem particularly related to the location and stressing
that it was an isolated incident, the taint spreads as fast
as rumor, with people using it as support for, or proof of,
entirely unrelated concerns they have. One woman, for example,
popped up on the neighborhood-watch list discussion of the
murders to report, with no segue, that a co-worker had “horrible
things to say” about a totally different section of Delaware
Avenue. Another told the Daily Gazette she had
put her house on the market, implying that this justified
her decision.
And the landlord of the apartment where it happened, Matthew
Ryan, though he can be forgiven for being shaken about having
this happen in his building, declared to the Times Union
that the area had “gone down” and claimed that having a police
outreach office nearby (as in, in one of his buildings), as
there used to be, would have prevented the murders, though
he never explained how that would have worked.
Ironically, most of the buildings surrounding Ryan’s properties
are actually in fairly good shape, some meticulously cared
for. His four, however, are painted top-to-bottom in a uniform
beige that makes that stretch of the block look like an institutional
hallway and they have long been hung with oversized for-sale
signs. It takes a lot of gall for him to complain about the
neighborhood.
If I were following Ryan’s example, I might turn around and
somehow try to blame him for fostering an environment where
a crime like this could happen. But that would be untrue,
and ludicrous. It wasn’t that kind of crime.
Unfortunately, the problem with statements like Ryan’s is
that when they feed into existing uncertainties about city
neighborhoods, they become self-fulfilling prophecies. People’s
beliefs about “good” and “bad” neighborhoods can be as unpredictable,
unfounded, and short-term as their beliefs about the stock
market.
I think it would be a poor memorial to three people who tragically
lost their lives to allow their loss to further affect the
lives of their neighbors by casting aspersions about where
they lived.
But it is also true that just as many rush too easily to complain
about the neighborhood, I can be just as knee-jerk in my rush
to defend it. I do think these issues are important, but I’m
also aware that it’s just as true for me as for everyone else
that it’s easier to be angry than sad, easier to critique
jumped-to conclusions than to imagine myself standing in that
courtroom or on that porch struggling with the pain of such
loss and betrayal, easier to make some meaning, however tangential,
than to sit with a reminder of how precarious life is.
That’s always hard to do. Perhaps I’ll go give it another
try.
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
www.mjoy.org
www.albanyplanningblog.org
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