Revisionist History - Guns Part 6: “Sin is the failure to bother to care”

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

Abdullah Pratt grew up in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America, then returned to be an ER doctor in his neighborhood hospital. At the end of Revisionist History’s series on everything Americans get wrong about guns, we offer a final lesson on the obligations and costs of compassion.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. I grew up in what we call Calumet Heights neighborhood. It's just southeast side of Chicago, you know, painted by violence and health inequities at a time when it was not nice to live in that neighborhood, at a time where it was very dangerous, where it was very gang-ridden. And yes, there's still a lot of violence today in Woodlawn. Nothing like just 20 years ago when I was a child growing up in these neighborhoods

and having to watch out for myself. On a cold and rainy winter's day, I went to Chicago to see a young man named Abdullah Pratt. Big beard, thick black plastic glasses, built like a linebacker. What was your path? When did you decide you wanted to go into medicine, and when did you decide you wanted to take emergency medicine? So I think I wanted to be a doctor since the time that I was a child. I remember having the Fisher-Price bag at Christmas and, you know, being three, four years old and

stuff. I grew up in the museums. So the Museum of Science and Industry was a sanctuary for me as a child. The Shedd Aquarium, I did my first dissection of a squid at the age of like seven or eight. Those things fueled a passion for science, a passion for anatomy. And after growing up in a completely 100% African-American community, I was in programs where I'd be the only African-American, but I was winning awards for being the best. So it taught me that I could compete and that I could make change. And when I was a senior in high school, I was working as a temp deliverer of grants on U Chicago's campus. Really good job. I was making like 17 an hour for that summer. Yeah, it was for high school. Oh, man, I didn't make that much money again until I was a

doctor. So I just let you know how that works. But I remember asking people like, hey, I live in Woodlawn a lot. I'm in Woodlawn a lot. And there's a lot of violence, a lot of social inequities. You ride your bike or walk two blocks and it's this beautiful campus. But you go and ask these heads of departments, hey, who's here fighting for the little people two blocks and it's this beautiful campus. But you go and ask these heads of departments, hey, who's here fighting for the little people two blocks away where my family is? Who is here who cares about them and who's doing something? I want to meet them. I want to ask them these questions

about why more isn't happening. And a couple of these heads of departments literally looked me in the face and said, young man, maybe you're the answer to the questions that you have. Maybe you have to take on the burden of sacrificing and making yourself into the type of candidate that can qualify to get here. Go get that 3.9 GPA. No excuses. Go fight for your community. Learn about the issues and do it.

My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is the final installment in our mini-series on gun violence. It's about a young man who grew up in one of the most dangerous communities in America, became an emergency room doctor, and decided to stay in the same neighborhood where he grew up. How many people from growing up do you know who died? I've got, I rank them by closeness to me, because if I said everybody, it'd probably be like in the

30s, 40s. But yeah, seriously, seriously, if everyone that I knew, like knew, talked with, shared time with at some point. So I really keep it to close friends. Right. So if I say close friends, people who I still have the text messages in my phone, people who I know, their family members, their mothers, their fathers prior to all of this. Fifteen friends, you know, my older brother, you know, is the one family member, my closest friend in the world, the day that my brother died. And I said, hey, you know, I lost my brother and you're the closest thing I got to brother. That person was murdered. Right. And all of them are leaving behind children. All of them were great fathers who I literally I think many of them, our last conversations were about parenting and fatherhood, close teammates.

Right. So I've had three close teammates just from my one high school team all be murdered. I've had youth that I mentored with some of the teams that I coached that were murdered. And many of them pronounced dead right in this trauma bay once we were finally able to get a trauma center. Some of these close friends I had to pronounce dead myself, had to tell their own family members that their loved one was no longer here. And as you can imagine, just to paint the picture for you, imagine, you know, walking into a room, you prepare yourself to tell this family member of your close friend

that they're no longer here. And the first thing that family member says, they see you and they light up. They forget why they're there for a second. They say, oh, my goodness, Abdullah. Hey, Abdullah. Hey, we were just talking about you. How are you? They forget that their son or daughter was shot. And then now the first words out of my mouth, which is the evidence-based way to do it, is to say they did not make it. So now they go from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows. I've had to do that about five times in the last three years. Only one time have I been forced to stop working the shift.

But usually I finish these usually early in my shifts, and I keep working because if I stop, then you think about it all. And you prepare yourself for the worst walking into any shift, especially when you grow up in a neighborhood. A few years ago, I did an episode of Revisionist History called The Standard Case, where I interviewed a Catholic priest named James Martin. He said something I've thought a lot about since. If you're a long-time listener, you may remember this moment.

No, you know, one of my professors of moral theology at Boston College, who I think you'd really like in terms of his writing, Jim Keenan. I met with Jim Keenan in Rome. Perfect person to talk to. He points out that for Jesus in the Gospels, sin is usually not where people are weak but trying, you know, people are really struggling, but where people are strong and not bothering. So, for example, the Good Samaritan, the priest, and the Levite simply, they don't bother. They just don't bother. They could help the guy, but they don't bother.

So, Jim Keenan said, for Jesus, sin is a failure to bother to love. In the story of the Good Samaritan, a man is beaten and robbed and left for dead at the side of the road. And one by one, men of faith, holy men, pass by without stopping, move to the other side of the road. They aren't complicit in the attack. They would never do anything like that themselves. They just choose to look the other way. And that, Keenan says, is the sin. Sin is indifference. Sin is the failure to bother to care. That is what this series has been about. There is a deep river of blood flowing down America's

streets, and yet it seems hard to get anyone's attention. The first two episodes of this series were about the Supreme Court's ruling in the Bruin case, where the court said that New York State's handgun licensing law was unconstitutional and in their decision spent more time talking about the 17th century than the 21st century. You do that when you're indifferent. The president stands up and says we have to ban assault rifles,

even though the guns he wants to ban aren't much different from the guns he didn't want to ban. You're that sloppy on a crucially important question when you've given up on any kind of meaningful change. Our success at treating gunshot wounds has lulled us into complacency. That was episode four.

We have hospitals in the wrong places for the dumbest of reasons. That was the fifth installment. The deeper I got into the subject of gun violence, the more bleak things seemed to be. So for this, our final installment, I went to Chicago and sat down with Abdullah Pratt in a little windowless room in the basement of the University of Chicago Hospital. And he showed me what bothering to care looks like. And unfortunately, that was the last words my brother told me before he was murdered, is looking at me being a first-year medical student at UChicago, he reiterated that. Like, hey, little brother, this is all good that you got a nice apartment, you got awards,

you're doing good things, you're chapter president of your student national medical association. But there are two types of people in this world. There are people that do for themselves, and there are people who do for others. The people who do for themselves, they get rich, they make money, they live somewhere else, but we call those sellouts. And then the people who do for others, they get broken by this. They end up poor. They're not able to actually have the impact that they want to. Abdullah's brother's name was Rashad. He was Abdullah's best friend and protector. He was killed when best friend and protector.

He was killed when he tried to stop some kids from stealing a car. He said this in lesser terms, but he said, maybe if you're as smart as I think you are, and as these wards are trying to say you are, maybe you'll be one of the first people to figure out how to do both, how to be able to protect your family, do well for yourself, grow your initiatives, and do for those at the very, very bottom, like your aunties, your best friends on the block, those type of people. He said, if you can do that, I'd be so, so proud of you.

And, you know, to this day, I'm still trying to figure that out. You know, I feel like I'm still that second type of person who's giving and still hasn't figured it out, But that's what keeps me fighting. When I met with Abdullah Pratt, I asked him what the busiest night of the week was at a trauma center. He said, weekends, of course, and holidays when people have been drinking a lot. This most recent month, the night before Martin Luther King's holiday was one of the

worst trauma nights I've ever had. You're talking about like, I think I had like six people pronounced dead from violence all in a night. A few more that made it to the operating room. Very critical injuries. That's a Sunday night in January that that's happening. The day before Martin Luther King's birthday, hours into the day of Martin Luther King's birthday is a big surprise. Dead on, pronounced dead? Yeah, yeah. If my memory's certainly right, it may have been more. Did you hear about what happened the night before Martin Luther King Day

on the south side of Chicago? I didn't. Now, if that had been a mass shooting, we all might have heard about that. Mass shootings seem to be the one part of the gun violence epidemic that still grab all of our attention, for good reason. But there are roughly 20,000 Americans murdered by guns in a typical year. And of that 20,000, only a few hundred die in mass shooting incidents. It's a very small part of the problem. If you could wave a magic wand and end all mass shootings tomorrow, the people who work in trauma centers say they wouldn't notice the difference. And if we want to be cynical, or maybe just realistic, we should admit to ourselves that paying so much attention to the smallest part of the problem

is a form of indifference. It's changing the subject. The thing that struck me about Abdullah Pratt is that he refused to change the subject. What guns are they using? All of them. So everything from the nine millimeters, the Glock 40s, which are very convenient.

A lot of them like the Glocks. Unfortunately, Glocks don't have safeties on them. So when those guys were shooting themselves, that's how that's happening. Many times it's with the Glocks. There used to be a day where everybody liked the revolvers because the shells didn't fall. And so you had less evidence. But now they don't care about evidence. The lack of conviction rate of murders.

Many people are killing people broad daylight with no mask on and literally daring people to hop on a stand and testify against them. And of course, no one does because we can't assure protection for those people. They still have to live a life. They still have to exist in the neighborhood. You're not going to put 24-hour protection on them. The kids were fitting something called a switch on the back of their handguns, a little plastic device you can buy on the internet that makes the gun fire much faster. A handgun is hard to aim at the best of times. With a switch, it's almost impossible to control.

I think there's a lot more brazenness of how these murders are happening, a lot less care for collateral damage. So you're looking at people when normally, and you can watch the videos. You can find these videos easily on YouTube or on, you know, social media of different aspects, but you see these like surveillance, you know, and the people literally just standing over someone shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting until the gun just doesn't even, you know, until that person

just stops moving and or the gun jams or something like that. He said that when he was growing up, a lot of the violence he saw around him was gang-related. Turf battles, business disputes over drugs that turned violent. But what he's seeing now is much worse. It's much more interpersonal, meaning that you can trace many of these beefs between local factions down to one or two murders that happened years ago, 10 years ago, when they were children, when they were 13, 14. And that unaddressed trauma of you losing your friend at 14 or 15 causes you to snap

in a way that if you don't have the right support system and you have access to firearms, you become that menace. You become that person. Admittingly, these are words they use, the that menace, you become that person. Admittingly, these are words they use, the super savages, the vultures. These are words that are coined by the youth themselves to describe themselves in this manner. And now you have a tit for tat. I go kill your cousin. You come kill my brother. I go kill two of your friends. You come kill this person. And it literally goes on and on. We're talking about two, three, four block territories. We're

not talking about whole sides of the cities that are dominated by a cartel or a gang. We're literally talking about, you know, yelling distance. If I can't hear you call, that means you're not in my set. If I scream out my front window and you ask them, how did you get here? And they'll tell you, oh, no, you don't know. Well, how can we help stop this? Ain't no stopping this. They killed my friend, my cousin, my brother. I'm not stopping until I'm dead. And so you have high, high at risk, deeply entrenched youth who are going through these things, who have been to help me? So why should I care about me killing your brother? Now everybody's life doesn't matter. Now you go rob someone and some innocent person gets shot. Don't nobody care when my auntie got shot. She got shot just walking from the Save-A-Lot store into her apartment one day.

You know, nobody cared about that. My cousins don't even have a mother anymore. So why should I care what happens to this lady? And it's hard to combat that. It's hard to combat that. It's hard to combat that. I began this series believing in stricter gun control, as you expect I would as a good Canadian

who lives in a blue state. Background checks, licenses, age limits, sensitive place laws, on and on. I still believe in all those things in the abstract,

but after I sat and listened to Abdullah Pratt, I realized that very little of what I thought of as a solution would actually solve the problems he was talking about. Can you really pass a law and make a big dent in this kind of a problem? Expecting laws to handle this kind of violence is what we do when we're not really paying attention. This is all the scoreboard. Another word that's coined by our youth is check the scoreboard. So let's see how many people of yours we kill, how many people you killed of ours, who's up. So it definitely is a competitive thing. It's a clout thing, an attention thing, too. So you can make your name off who you kill, even if you have nothing against that person. Just by saying, I shot that person, everybody's mad,

everybody's heard about that, look at me. When you place yourself in the shoes of a young man or woman who's never had a room full of trophies, never had the awards on their mother's refrigerator, they've never had anything to take pride in that says, I'm good at something. I'm a winner, at least at one thing. They don't even have that. And they feel like their whole life, they've taken nothing but losses to their pride. Every day someone's stepping on it. Every day somebody's telling them what to do. Every day this. So when you run into somebody, you're like, listen, I'm not doing that again today. Today, I will not take another L. And in those different types of situations, something like, hey, I'm a big name now because I shot and killed somebody. That may be the first time that anybody gave them any type of respect, any type of admiration and adoration, unfortunately, happens.

This may be the first time that girls know your name. So you might have went to high school. You would have wanted maybe struggled to read. Maybe you had learning disabilities that were unaddressed. You didn't have the finances to dress in the nicest clothes. And now you're somebody. All of a sudden you wake up and people are talking about you on Twitter in these spaces, these very entrenched spaces or on Snapchat or whatever the case is. And to many, that's a powerful position because for once they can control something.

They can cause fear in someone. For a 30-year stretch starting in the early 90s, Chicago didn't have a trauma center on the south side of the city. So if you were shot there, you had to be taken to big hospitals at the other ends of the city, north to northwestern or Cook County or west to Advocate Christ Medical Center, which meant that if you were shot on the south side, you were far more likely to die in the ambulance before you got to the hospital. We talked about that in the previous episode. Abdullah Pratt was a big part of the

fight to finally open a trauma center on the south side. And during that battle, one case hit him hard, the shooting of a young man named O.T.F. Nooski. And I didn't know this at the time, but there was a big scene gathered also not too far from where I grew up. And there were people standing around yelling at the police saying, why aren't you helping him? Why aren't you helping him? And this young man, I can remember driving past slowly as I get past the crowd and just seeing him gasping for air, blood all over the place, nobody helping, yellow tape starting to be put up. And I remember that just hit me heavily. And it was that day that I found out that there was a law that says that if there's an active shooter event going on or the scene hasn't been secured, the police do not allow ambulances in to help. And that's what also galvanized with myself, my MedKeep team does, to try to train lay bystanders, not only in how to

deal with these gunshot wounds, but also in the laws that allow them, the Good Samaritan Act, the innocent bystander laws that protect them from prosecution for trying to help if they're earnestly trying to help. And we trained over 7,000 youth in Chicago Southside in areas that had no other trainings like this going on. 7,000 youth people in the south side of Chicago, basically about how to handle a gunshot wound before help comes? Yeah, those things, those memories are etched into my mind almost as clear as my brother's,

the memory of seeing him being pulled out of his truck the day he died. So when you look at it that way and you look at the potential, those young men would have been 26, 7 now. They would have been coming into their own, maybe helping stop violence. As he talked, he was on his way over to a school not far away, Dulles Elementary, to do one of those training sessions, this time with a group of fourth graders. Yeah, yeah, it's in the heart of Parkway Gardens,

a.k.a. DeWick, a.k.a. O'Block, right? The most notorious project housing still standing in Chicago. And we'll be there. We're going to teach them actually how to deal with gunshot wounds and do CPR. When I first get there for them, what it's going to be like is them, number one, saying, hey, who we are, this is a sensitive moment. But we asked them, how many of you all have lost a loved one, a father, mother, brother to gun violence? When we've asked that school before, 100% of their hands go up. And that's rare. So for these fourth graders, they're going to be asked that these hands go up. I'll show you the pictures and videos of it happening. Usually we get like 50%, 60%, and that's high. That's

extremely high. But when it's 100% of the hands that go up and they can name, oh, it was my brother, it was my sister, it was my father, it was both my uncles. When it's like that, now we're going to say, well, we're here today to help you all know what to do in that situation. How many of you all, if you knew something about how to help them, would have helped? And then 100% of those hands go up. So we stitch it together. He's teaching the kids how to be first responders, to do what they can do before the ambulance arrives. Then we teach them the ABCs, really simple. A means alert 911. Call 911, tell them you need an ambulance, what's happened, where you are, and importantly, that the shooter has left the scene. So that's A. B stands for bleeding, find the bleeding. So now you have to see what's injured. So if that means ripping open a pants leg or a shirt or something like that to find the hole,

it's important because if you start putting tourniquets or holding pressure on a hole and that's not where the hole actually is, you're actually not even helping them and you could be creating more harm for the person. So then the next thing is C, which is compress the wound. Compress the bleeding wound, teaching them how to place tourniquets and things, and being practical to say, you're probably not going to have a tourniquet. You're probably not going to have gauze. So this is how you use a tampon, right? It was meant to go into holes and soak up blood. For young men, you've probably never seen this unless you were playing in your sister's drawer or something, but we'll teach you how to use this because this is probably going to be at

your fingertips. You know, maxi pads and absorptive pads are going to be at your fingertips. That's what you need. You need to be able to pack these wounds to help absorb, to give this person time. And so we try to keep it simple. We're not trying to teach them how to be a trauma surgeon. We're trying to get them to feel confident enough to act, do something, call 911 early, sit there with the person. And then 911 will actually walk you through these things. And this past summer, we actually had a young lady, a young Latina lady who, one of my best students. And she came to me week two and she's like, Dr. Pratt, I need a new kit. I'm like, girl, you lost your kit already? I'm like, okay, I'll go get you a

new kit. She's like, no, I didn't lose it. I promise. I promise. I didn't lose it. I said, what happened? She said, I had to use it. And I was like, what do you mean you had to use it? She was like, oh man, they shot someone right in front of my house. She said, I got it on video. It shows me the video. She did everything right. She took the time to watch the people leave. She calls 911 on the way out. She goes and gets her kit that we had just given her days before that. And the police come right on time. And they're like, you can't be here. You need to move. And she's like, no, no, there's a law that says that I can be here and help. And I have the kid and I don't know, I don't

want to see him die. And they're like, we will compromise. We'll take the kit. We'll make sure we use it. We just don't want you in harm's way. You can stand off to the side. And literally she has the pictures and videos of them using everything in that kit, the tourniquets, the gauze, the everything, strung out, used. And so, of course, she got her another kit. And I was so proud of her for being a judge. This young lady was either 16 or 17. She wasn't even a senior yet. So this was like a sophomore, junior. This is nuts. Yeah. In the streets of Chicago, an ER doctor who has lost 15 close friends and his older brother to gun violence is going out to local elementary schools on his afternoon off and teaching fourth graders how to stabilize a gunshot wound.

This is what it means to bother to care. Abdullah Pratt doesn't turn his back on where he's from, or hide behind a wall of indifference, or change the subject. He sees a river of blood, and he says, maybe there's something I can do right now to stem the tide. Do I know what the equivalent act is for the rest of us who don't live in the middle of the crisis? I don't. But we can at least start by acknowledging that Abdullah Pratt's Chicago is also our Chicago,

our country, our flesh and blood. We live here too. I just want to feel the youth to feel empowered many times. I just want them to feel like they have ownership of their own community and that they are the best position to solve these problems. There is no one, some big chariot, some messiah that's going to come through that's a politician that's going to fix your problems. It's going to be on you. That's what history shows us.

There is no one, no messiah, no politician who's going to fix your problems. It's going to be on you. No one should have to give that speech to a room full of fourth graders. Sin is the failure to bother to care.... The Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Thank you. I'm not sure. Our revisionist history gun series was produced by Jacob Smith, Ben-Nadav Hafri, Chiara Powell, Tali Emlin, and Lee Mangistu.

We were edited by Peter Clowney and Julia Barton. Fact-checking by Arthur Gompertz and Michelle Williams. Mastering by Flan Williams. Engineering by Nina Lawrence. I'm Malcolm Glaper. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, I'll be gone at Artisan Production, produced by Kenan McRae, choral arrangements by Luis Guerra, drums by Mike Longoria, all other instruments played by Luis Guerra. Music for this series, written, arranged, and produced by Luis Guerra. Special guests include Mike Longoria, Jimmy Messer, and Kamal Humphrey. Samples were cleared by L. Chepelin Music. Additional mixing and mastering at P&L Records.

Special thanks to John Meistes for connecting the New Orleans-based choir Voices of Art of Sound with the team at Revisionist History.