A terrible thing happened in my beloved hometown, Chicago, last week.
An 18-year-old freshman at Loyola University named Sheridan Gorman was out walking with a group of friends along the city’s far north side lakefront at 1:30 in the morning on March 19th. They’d hoped to take pictures of Chicago’s distant skyline from a pier.
The Jetty at Pratt Avenue on Lake Michigan the Next Morning.
Gorman, according to a Chicago Sun-Times story about the incident, was the first to reach the end of the pier. She turned around and saw a masked man, carrying a gun. The group began to scatter and then a shot rang out. Gorman was shot in the back. She died.
The young woman’s life was snuffed out at what might have been one of the most joyous, hopeful, promising moments she’d ever experienced. On her own at a university with her new circle of friends, taking in the sights of the big city, her entire adult future before her. I bet she was, in the words of the song, “as giddy as a baby on a swing.”
And some no-good son of a bitch took it all away from her.
The alleged shooter has been apprehended and charged. Of course, in this deranged American day and age, he turns out to be an immigrant in this country illegally. The White House and countless Trumpists on the internet all have become tumescent over the tragedy. You see, they’re bleating, that’s why we’ve got to round up all the illegal immigrants before they shoot us all.
Sheridan Gorman’s parents have issued a statement imploring people to stop using their daughter’s tragic death as a political talking point. Good luck with that.
Maria Hadden, the alderman of the 49th Ward where the killing occurred was asked about lakefront safety. She tried to assure neighbors and tourists that the lakefront is generally safe. She attempted to position the tragedy as an isolated incident. Gorman, she said, “was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
It would be impossible for her to utter a more innocuous statement. Sheridan Gorman, indeed, was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her death was the definitive example of that old saw.
Yet, a disturbing number of media commentators have expressed outrage and callers to Hadden’s office have informed her that she should die for saying that. Their reasoning? She’s blaming the victim. Fox News and the New York Post have jumped on the fury bandwagon.
Hadden had to shut down her ward office for a few days this week because she and her staff were made jittery by the threats and the overall rage. In announcing her office’s temporary closing, Hadden apologized for saying what she did.
Let me repeat that. She apologized. It’s like the ghost of Sheridan Gorman apologizing to the man who pulled the trigger for getting in the way of his bullet.
This promiscuous apologizing business has got to stop. Especially that being done, obsessively, by Democrats, progressives, liberals, and pretty much everybody with whom I identify. Those on my side of the fence spend more time apologizing than coming up with effective strategies to prevent the Trump Party from turning this holy land into his personal fiefdom.
Just stop it.
But it ain’t gonna happen soon. Lest you think it’s just the MAGA mob who are pushing the memory of poor Sheridan aside to make room for their own gotchas or other tribal blatherings, keep in mind my old maxim: the worst thing about democracy is the people.
Another party felt the need to apologize in the fallout from Gorman’s killing.
The headline over a story on the apprehension and charging of the alleged shooter in the Loyola Phoenix, the university’s student newspaper, on March 23rd read: “Immigrant Man Charged in Murder of Sheridan Gorman, DHS Involved.” Again, it’s awfully hard to quibble with the headline. The man being charged was indeed an immigrant and, while many people who have come to these shores from other lands are law-abiding citizens or guests, a man who’s here without due authorization killing someone does indeed ring an alarm. If this nation had a reasonable, logical immigration policy as well as equitable, efficient enforcement thereof, the alleged shooter might not have been lying in wait for his innocent victim.
Instead, we have ICE, Trump’s schutzstaffel, busy rounding up as many brown-skinned souls as can fit in their unmarked vans to be sped off to some holding cage with few human comforts and next to no medical care. ICE was in Chicago this past winter, corralling scores of suspected illegal immigrants with impunity and killing at least one. Sheridan Gorman’s alleged shooter, by the way, somehow escaped the notice of ICE, despite its stated goal of apprehending “the worst of the worst” among undocumented immigrants. He, acc’d’g to reports, was arrested for shoplifting in 2023 and subsequently did not appear in court on that charge. Sounds like someone ICE ought to have been zeroing in on from the get-go.
Anyway, among all this tragic murdering, undocumented illegality, and private presidential police forcing, the Loyola Phoenix found it necessary to apologize for pointing out in its headline that the alleged shooter was an immigrant. Even worse, acc’d’g to its mea culpa, the newspaper referred to him in the body of the story as “illegal.”
The Loyola Phoenix got down on its hands and knees, as it were, groveled, and begged for forgiveness for using such horrifying language.
Meanwhile, ICE is taking over America’s airports in addition to Democrat-run cities. Its holding cages are still bursting at the seams while undocumented immigrants with criminal records are still at large.
And Sheridan Gorman remains dead.
Sheridan Gorman.
