When the television or radio news anchors utter the words, “teen takeover,” my mind immediately fills with lurid visions of dozens of children running helter-skelter through downtown Chicago and the lakefront areas. This usually takes place once some ill-meaning “influencer” puts out the call over social media to the masses of gullible adolescents who foolishly obey the siren call to assemble.
Since I worked as a reporter for WGN-TV for almost 50 years, covering countless demonstrations, protests, gang disputes and marches, I can easily visualize these disruptive gatherings and envision how the galvanizing forces within the crowds cause the young folks to run aimlessly down the streets. The teens resemble a giant flock of sparrows, swooping through the sky, following one lost leader, then jerking away to trail another blind front flyer with no idea what they are doing, where they are going or why they are there.
Many of these rowdy gatherings turn antisocial. The natural inclination that teens have to show off and outdo each other causes the wild ones in the crowd to jump on cars or climb on elevated objects, so they can dance, shout and be seen. The others, like sheep, copy the ringleaders, skipping, dancing, laughing and singing until a fight erupts or a shot rings out. Then the songs turn to screams. What was supposed to be fun is now a frightening nightmare.
These repeated gatherings raise so many questions. If you were an impressionable teen and saw such an assembly go wrong with fights, arrests, gunshots and possibly a death, why would you go to other similar gatherings? Where are your parents? Where are your older brothers and sisters who know better?
No one knows — not even the city of Chicago —who these kids are. Within the last decade, including the devastating COVID-19 pandemic, Chicago Public Schools lost 70,000 students. Some may have moved. Some may have gone to private schools. But the number of CPS middle and high schoolers missing 18 days or more of school shot up during the pandemic and has remained high, a study released earlier this year found.
I’m not surprised many fell by the wayside during the height of the pandemic. During that period, I sat with my granddaughter during her third-grade online schooling each day and witnessed that it was tough for many kids to pay attention and stay motivated. My granddaughter did great. Her parents and I were ever-present sentinels.
But for many children who were not supervised, the temptation to hang out with friends won out. CPS got rid of truancy officers in the early 1990s. So, some of these absentee students fell through the cracks. Now, we are paying the price for our negligence in heeding the needs of some of those forgotten children.
Can you imagine just how lost, bored and hopeless children without high school diplomas can be? Where are they going to find jobs? Life for many of them is a constant hustle, a daily struggle just to survive.
Those of us who sit smugly in our homes and frown at the TV news stories about crowds of mostly Black teens filling intersections and lakefront parks and look at our spouses and shake our heads, should realize that these gatherings are a symptom of a greater illness: a disease of “painful invisibility.” For way too long, society has ignored this giant segment of our community.
Enhancing the programs currently in place, Mayor Brandon Johnson and the 50 City Council members should join forces with the business, civic, and religious communities to institute a modern-day Marshall Plan.
Like our country’s Marshall Plan of 1948 that was designed to help Western Europe rebuild after World War II, Chicago’s Marshall Plan would target the South and West sides, focusing on youth jobs, supervised activities and work training. The positive payoff would benefit us all.
Until then — before more people are hurt — parents, grandparents, older siblings and even neighbors have to tell these impressionable youngsters that their choices to gather and act out are a horrible idea and that there is nothing positive to gain by acting negatively.
Robert Jordan, Ph.D., is a retired television news journalist, author and former weekend anchor of the WGN News at Nine on WGN-TV.