Let it Rip

On the Highland Park mass shooting.

While holed up this weekend with the latest sneaky variant of Covid-19, I watched The Bear. It’s about Carmy, a top-notch chef who comes back home to Chicago to run his family’s Italian beef joint after his brother kills himself. Chicago, my hometown, was already on my mind for various reasons when I learned of the shooting in Highland Park.

I’d just gotten to the last episode when Carmy tells us about his brother’s favorite saying: “Let it rip.” It’s perfect Chicago slang, but it also captured the hope and despair of this moment for me. Let it rip. Give it all you’ve got. Throw caution to the wind. Go for it. 

First, a few words about Highland Park: It is where my dad took us to see $3 matinees on Sunday afternoons after my parents did their divorced children handoff. It’s where my dad got chopped liver, corned beef, and challah rolls at an old-school Jewish deli, the last of its kind on the North Shore of Chicago. It’s where my mom would drive on occasions to have breakfast at Walker Bros. Pancake House because she loved the stained glass windows (now the glass is shattered).  Highland Park is where had one of my first summer jobs as an usher at Ravinia, a world-class venue. 

But all the interesting things about this town’s identity are stripped away. Now Highland Park is boiled down to “an affluent suburb” — which it is, but that’s not all it is. It will be shorthand for mass shooting. Now bloodshed and death will be the first thing that pops up when you Google it. I suppose it’s the same for Uvalde, Parkland, and so many other places defined by gun violence.

I’ve been thinking a lot about two of the victims, one a grandfather from Mexico, Nicolas Toledo-Zaragoza, and the other, Irina McCarthy, a mother about my age whose parents came from the former Soviet Union. Though they are from different worlds, their families both came here, or brought them here, for a better life.

A better life? If mass shootings are a tiger, it’s on the prowl again, getting closer and closer to your hometown. 

Highland Park is affluent, but that part of its description rankles. Yes, it’s true. The word is being used as a shield, as if affluence sanitizes the bloodshed. But it doesn’t make you bulletproof, or any less dead.

Maybe it bothers me because of the trajectory that might lead a family to Highland Park. Maybe your great-grandparents come from a shtetl where they were poor or persecuted to the West Side of Chicago, where after a generation they might move to Skokie and maybe, if they worked hard and got lucky, they’d make your way up the lake, past the WASP-y suburbs that didn’t welcome Jews, keep driving up the lake to a place that yes, finally, after three or four generations, felt like home. Sure it was luxe and expensive, but all that was secondary. You’d move there because you belonged, and because you felt safe. 

I think it’s important to say their names. The victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting were gay men. In the Buffalo shooting, we lost Black elders. In Uvalde, Latinx children, many first-generation immigrants, were slaughtered. And because there are Jews in Highland Park, it’s important not to rule out anti-Semitism. Hate is a strong, toxic motivator.

The perversity if it all is that a semi-automatic rifle doesn’t care what color you are. We bleed the same, we die the same.

Anyway, I really enjoyed The Bear, in part because it featured all my favorite types of toxic males (I’m kidding, sort of) who always said ‘let it rip’. You could say, perversely, that’s what the gunman did. On some level, such a disregard for life, including your own, comes from a sense of despair. It’s the kind of deep hopelessness that mutates into hate and anger, which then fuels destruction.  

Let it rip. I keep thinking about the phrase, and the other side of the coin. What would you let go of, or chase after, if you weren’t so afraid? The only time I’ve been unafraid of risk is during periods of freefall, when everything felt surreal or uncertain. 

Letting it rip becomes less scary when you have nothing to lose. I’d like to stay in this headspace. We’re not promised tomorrow. What are you holding back?