Firemen Misbehaving at Broadway & Granville
By Steven Larsen, one of our reporters from Evanston
Not every basket is full of bad apples, or however that saying goes. I love to visit my friends and am even taking a class this semester in what I call “Little Edgewater.” It is the neighborhood with tons of fentanyl, guns, strong-arming, shoplifting, and chaos.
You can buy any Walgreens items at one of the popular restaurants and the managers and owners of those businesses allow it. Great place! Wonderful place to get some heroin mmm! I love visiting Little Edgewater!
Some people just call it “home.”
A random tradition that has gone on for some time now is firetrucks going on imaginary runs at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning, simply to wake up the homeless, sleeping anywhere and everywhere they can find. Especially in the summer months.
What the firemen do is, leave the station and then drive up on sleeping homeless persons, suddenly honking the horn and running the sirens. They do this for about one block, and then turn off the sirens and the horns.
This happens typically around Broadway & Granville, Broadway & Thorndale, and Broadway & Rosemont.
Then they drive another block or two to the next “scene” needing to be stirred up. They drive up on the houseless folks, suddenly honking the horn and running the sirens. This jolts the homeless people wide awake. They report it is impossible to fall back asleep afterwards. The firemen continue like this for about one block, and then turn off the sirens and the horns.
The firemen laugh and wave and look like idiots as they make fun of people “lower than they are.” It seems to be human nature sometimes, that people who feel “low” have to make other people feel “lower” than they are.
If we break down this dehumanizing activity meant so the firemen feel “less low” on the feeding chain out there (because they did not go to college or are poor Whites or have a steady boyfriend their wife does not know about) we see it is mean for other reasons:
1. There is no bathroom for the unhoused people to use out in the open when the sun is coming up and the traffic is speeding through the Little Edgewater intersections (cops allow this in that area).
2. There is no hot free coffee. The firemen have hot coffee. We are buying their coffee in the stationhouse. We are paying for the cream and the sugars and probably most every other snack, utility, luxury, and commodity they enjoy as city employees. From the looks of most of them, they have consistent access to a HUGE number of calories.
3. The game is unfair. The unroofed persons sleeping outdoors who are jolted awake by the firemen cannot throw a beer bottle at the firetruck or shoot at it. That would be inappropriate. So they have no way they can “win” in the situation. Rotten stuff, you silly sparks in your big noisy red trucks!
4. The game could lead to trouble. Okay, so we are waking up a person who has slept outdoors and not had really great quality Zs overnight… being woken up 6 times by people looking for a light for a cigarette or some unhappy old White person screaming at them to get a job and behave. I am paraphrasing. So you are taking somebody with little sleep and harassing them by waking them up—loudly. Nice guys.
Dehumanizing. That is the word.
It’s like what has been going on for years in the football showers at Northwestern University—something most Wildcats are not exactly proud of. Newbies who fumble the ball get “ran” after the Shrek clap on the practice field. (There are 1000s of articles on this if you want to google for this… though one person seems to have written 900 of them.) So what does this dehumanizing “ran” event entail?
The offending fumbler is stripped naked, held down by a dozen naked team mates. Then they dry hump him and ejaculate all over his body. Yes, there is quite a bit of trauma caused by this. The offender is scared to death, apparently. The fact there have not been suicides because of this cat activity is amazing.
I have heard many, many versions of this and the other attacks against the younger players and the anger the players feel that there are some random people who will swear the football coach knew nothing about it.
…that none of the men on top are gay or even remotely attracted to men.
…that similar assaults and attacks do not happen “in our sport.”
Why must people disenfranchise others? Why must they dehumanize them?
An employee in one of the public libraries who limps around the place all day insists on waking up people who have drifted off. “Are you okay?” she asks them. When they respond, she automatically responds, “There’s no sleeping in the library.”
Why this is so funny to her is not that hard to understand. She feels “normal” and maybe like part of the ruling class. After all, she is doing nothing illegal. And as a (presumably) employee of the library, it is okay for her to remind people of this policy (if in fact it exists).
People see how important and normal and empowered she is. No longer does she has some sort of disability. She presumably has a good place to sleep, gets lots of sleep, and unlike most people in the world, she has a microwave and a shower and soap and towels, and
Now former President Trump drifts off in the courtroom lately and I do not know if somebody reminds him there is a policy against that, if in fact there is one, and who the random employee assigned to those housekeeping duties might be.
Taxpayers are funding these kinds of fire department shenanigans at Broadway & Granville and at other intersections and viaducts in Little Edgewater.
Men and women are funny animals. Most of the idiots above are men. Though the employees at the burger joint where you can buy Fireball and more stolen from the Whole Foods store on Broadway are all women. Those women negotiate the prices of the stolen goods down. Their managers (some are women) allow them to break the law.
Men. Anger. Even at Northwestern University? Not gay men, but men who want to teach those underclassmen a lesson. The kind of typical thing men are always saying like “I am not gay, but to teach that kid a lesson we are going to hold him down naked and rub our naked bodies on him and cover him in our sp*rm.”
Somebody told me the other day that none of the above activities, assaults, attacks, or affairs still go on. People have heard rumors about some of the above—and we have to read about it every day—and people are too stupid to know that Trump guy is probably on Xanax or some other medication so that he will calm down, keep quiet, and just generally behave.
I wonder what kind of medication would have worked to stop the above crimes against people would be the right one. For now, we have to hope the firemen in fact do other things and leave the unroofed persons asleep out there alone.
There is an awesome old saying that goes something like this, “If you have a big one, you don’t need a big firetruck.”