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A freelancer’s pilgrimage to Kenosha
The Journey
I planned a trip to Kenosha during the final week of the Rittenhouse trial. My intent was to discover only the essential facts related to this and the Jacob Blake case, the underpinning of the Kenosha riots of 2020. Did I really need to go? I’m just a freelancer, with only local experience. I had been told all facts by a professional and elite media, confirmed in concert by government officials from the DA to the US President. There was nothing to dispute. Yet the accumulation of photographs and video footage and statements seemed to contradict the facts as reported. On Friday, I decided I needed to go. My interest was no longer on the trial, but on the media itself. I’m only a local freelancer. But I am from Missouri - they were going to have to show me.
Kenosha
Kenosha is part of a nearly contiguous urban quilt running from Gary, Indiana, through Chicago, Il around southern Lake Michigan, then north through Milwaukee, Wis. Yet Kenosha proper, like Green Bay, has a small-town feel. Kenosha remains a relatively safe area for its size. There are several small towns in Southeast Missouri with higher crime rates. Until the mostly peaceful protests of 2020 you were more likely to be a victim of a violent crime in Sikeston than Kenosha. From US 94 to the lake, I didn’t see any building taller than three stories. 60th street took me past part of the city’s industry, much of it in decay and part of an extensive brownfield. I was told that some businesses won’t be coming back. On my left a ‘HOPCO,’ its capital ‘S’ having melted away with its customers, was one of many reminders.
I wandered downtown blocks throughout the day, stopping from time to time to talk to people. I found the residents quiet but friendly. Opinions about the trial, the verdict, the protests, the rioting, and the media were varied. I spent part of the morning at the breakwater, less than a mile from the courthouse. The fisherman told me about themselves and their city. One showed me a pic of an earlier catch, a monster as big as he was. But he didn’t catch anything today. The guys around him quietly cast, reeled, cast, reeled. They caught nothing for the remainder of the morning. I half wondered if they worked for the DA.
I ran into a local teacher whose worldview was quite different from mine. Nevertheless we had a long and polite conversation. She and her husband were developing an Afro-Centric charter school. “We always start in the middle when we teach history.” She wanted her students to be more aware of man’s slow exodus from Africa to the rest of the world. Her excitement was that of Louis Leaky rediscovering African tools once used by the first humans. We promised to stay in touch. I wondered if she realized how much her presence- friendly, positive and inviting- was helping to heal her community.
Ground Zero
The Kenosha County Courthouse is one of four buildings framing a small park. The second structure to rest there, it was built in 1925 and now part of the national historic building treasury. It is assembled with light gray Indiana limestone in a neoclassical design supported in front by eighteen ionic columns. It was defaced when I photographed it. The eastern and southern buildings were also built in the neoclassical style. The southern building was the old high school, now the City’s alternative school. To the west is the City Museum, a Breau-Arts structure circa 1908, also a historic landmark. It was near this area that I met ‘Fred.’
‘Fred’ (I won’t use his real name out of professional courtesy) is with Milwaukee Radio. His philosophy of reporting includes the quiet wisdom of ‘staying in the center’ in order to keep his reporting from being slanted. He was here during the unrest last year. His vehicle was damaged, and still showed pockmarks from paintballs. I didn’t think paintballs did that much damage. He said, “they do when they’re frozen.” He recalls some of the other damage during his tour. He also recalled the transfer from the civil to the disorderly as if someone flipped a switch. The local and the municipal had their say at the podiums and almost immediately afterward the disruptors took control. There was not enough of a police presence to maintain any semblance of public order. The consequences include blocks of abandoned businesses. I told Fred I appreciated his professionalism and hoped that he stayed safe.
Through the week the media commandeered the small park in front of the courthouse. By mid-morning Saturday convoys of big dark SUVs with windows black as shoe polish announced the arrival of media royalty: a sprinkling of gorgeous young women with hand mics and their entourage of serious, frowning, humorous men. The big names at the center and the corners of the park marked their territory with metal framing for canopies, lights, and cameras. Thick power cords led from equipment back to command-style vehicles or generators. I wandered from venue to venue all morning and other than my conversation with Fred I didn’t get a nibble from any of them. They were too busy talking to each other or their electronics.
Back to Missouri
I’m glad I made the trip. As a son of Wisconsin I’m always happy to get back home. But the area seems different somehow. God’s country is no longer as innocent as it was just a few years ago. I remain frustrated with media as a collective whose myopia and laziness helped to create this crisis. I learned nothing new from them and that simply confirmed to me their slow but inexorable irrelevance. I had to find the truth from the world of the freelancers who, without a network and with a budget of zero, are slowly assuming by default the Role of the Press. Thank God for Julio Rosas- freelancer- who was at the right place at the right time, with his curiosity, his courage and his camera. Finally, I left the square in the afternoon and watched one last media entourage set up on the corner of the city museum- one dedicated to dinosaurs. A big steel tyrannosaurus skeleton overshadowed the news crew who, if they had the journalistic instinct to look around for a few seconds, might have caught the irony.