'Chiraq.' More than entertainment?

'Chiraq.' More than entertainment?

Recent riots in Ferguson and Baltimore and the media's overkill reporting on both events did nothing more than to make both whites and blacks look bad in the resulting worldwide coverage. Both of these riots occurred in areas of poor working class people and yet many professionally made protest signs appeared out of nowhere overnight - and similarly in Ferguson.

The video coverage of the many clergymen marching for peace went by with the blink of an eye and there was just one short clip that went viral of a local African-American lady slapping her son around for joining in the unruly crowd harassing policemen. However, most of the news footage focused on raw violence which serves as a model for others to create more violence.

It appears that the riots in Chicago following the King assassination did not serve as a learning tool for these newer generations of rioters and their instigators. The fallout from that riot was the catalyst that caused 200,000 Chicagoans, along with much of industry to flee Chicago and to suburban areas. Seven thousand abandoned buildings slowly resulted and losing these real estate taxes en masse served to add fuel to Chicago's financial woes. Along the way Chicago became the murder capital of the world with an horrendous yearly murder rate that leaves police, the residents or the Jesse Jacksons clueless for an answer to stopping this carnage.

All of this has caught the eye of Hollywood's filmmaker Spike Lee who is now in the Chicago area with a "Chiraq" script in hand to begin filming the daily chaos that plagues the South and West sides. Hopefully his film will provide the strong moral message needed to put the ongoing carnage to rest rather than to just provide "entertainment."

Walter Santi

Bloomingdale