Here are Seven of my Chicago Tribune Published Letters. I am a "Frequent Letter Writer" and was profiled.
1. Thoughts on homelessness
October 24, 2013
Traversing the streets in Chicago, I notice the abundance of homeless men and women malingering about in the cold. They stand and shiver and shake their cups of change and I get struck with a sense of my own vulnerability.
Seeing a homeless person begging out in the cold, steam escaping their mouths as they ask for money, touches something primal within me. They are alive in the same way I am.
I ask myself, “What if it were me begging on the streets?” Seeing someone so destitute evokes those moments in my own life when I was broken, battered and beaten. Times when I could not get out of bed because the pressure of life was too heavy. Times when I wanted to recede into the darkness because of financial fears, social betrayal and failure.
I feel sympathy when I see a homeless person begging on the street. I think, “Maybe we aren’t so different after all, but they could get their lives together if they just tried a little harder.”
I think that maybe if I ignore them long enough they won’t affect me anymore. But they do. I feel guilt but I stride away to my all-important life pretending it doesn’t affect me. And sometimes I give money out of guilt, not charity, because I have to hedge myself in this life. I can’t count anything out, nothing is impossible, even homelessness. I’ll be glad to have helped when my life is once again on the slab.
— Kyle Tyrrell, Glenview
2. Season of snow
Is there anything more beautiful than a snowfall at night amid the twinkling lights of our beautiful Chicago — like a sea of bleary stars swathed and dappled ever so softly in a Van Gogh painting?
Or the silence of a winter's storm as, flake by flake, the snow falls and entombs that which does not move?
To stop and ponder that there is no remedy for the snow, it humbles even the mightiest of us Chicagoans.
There aren't streamlining gimmicks or marketing solutions, no strategies or campaigns. It can't be outsourced, downsized, demoted or fired.
No, the snow falls and consumes all that ever was in a blanket of cold. But, though it is cold, there is warmth to it — a transcendent warmth. The kind of warmth that reflects our basic humanness.
Nobody can market it. Nobody can box it up and sell it. Nobody can take it and keep it or divide it apart. Nobody can stop it or tell it to start again.
It exists apart from us. And its evanescence perishes when our fervent desire is applied to it. No, it cannot be held for long; our warmth melts it to prosaic water.
The snow brings staggering changes with it. Take a trip to the shores of Lake Michigan and behold what the snow does to it. The ice, the grayness and the rebellion of the water trapped underneath appear more extraterrestrial than Earthly.
The homeless denizens of our city shore up in nooks and underpasses to stave off the cold oppression of the snow. Be sure to give them something warm, and be kind.
It is the coldest, grayest season in Chicago, and like a frozen steel rail outside Union Station, the air feels cutting and appears sterile.
But when the heavy clouds pregnant with snow part, they betray the stars and moon still burning there like embers of a once prodigious fire.
So act with warmth this winter and give to those who sleep in the streets, exposed to that indifferent snow.
The snow is cold. But each heart is a warming fire.
Happy season of snow Chicago.
— Kyle Tyrrell, Glenview
3. Voice of the People, Sep. 01
September 01, 2013
38
Unstoppable changes
As the summer is strangled down to its last dying embers of warmth and vitality, let us mourn the death of a season with the cold, rusty knell of autumn. Darkness will soon steal the hours and the breeze will have a bitter kiss to it, much more like an estranged lover than the warm matronly kisses of summer breezes.
The sun will shine at an angle that casts a forlorn glow across Chicago, like a lighthouse upon a far more distant shore. The raven-black crows with their deadened caws will soon dominate a once vivacious ecosystem of life. A somber palate of red-orange and streaky gray will settle in like some alien presence across the land, unwanted and inimical.
Let us not lament over the unceremonious halting of summer but embrace fall for its more macabre take on beauty. Like life, the seasons are as rapidly cycling as our temperaments, caprices, dalliances and whimsies.
We Chicagoans bluster about our reptilian politics, our morbid crime rate and the inexorable taxes levied upon us.
Let us take a nod from the truculent entity: autumn, the indifferent transporter from summer to winter. She ushers in that barren landscape and cutting arctic wind that swoops down over Lake Michigan.
So we must usher in the lamentable state of our dynamic city. There is far too much beauty around us to let politics, crime and unfair assessments kill our warm Chicagoan spirits.
There are too many good citizens in this vibrant city to let the "fall" of a few disrupt our collective reverence of fall for the many. Fall can mark the death of our old ways to make way for the birth of an entirely new way of life — a prelude to something far more beautiful than what exists now.
Some are never going to change, but the seasons always will.
— Kyle C. Tyrrell, Glenview
4. Internet traps
In response to recent articles on the dark sides of the Internet — i.e., harassing memorial pages, outrageously lewd conduct and ubiquitous access to pornography — I've come to think of the Internet as the Wild West. No rules, no laws, no protectors, no regulations, no limits.
For some it is a revolutionary cornucopia of knowledge, creativity and auspices. But for still others, it is a bear-trap for isolation and debilitating transference of aggression and vanity. Pornography and cyber-bullying are sustenance for the antisocial and enable them to operate from the safety of their dimly lit rooms. Same goes with the pseudo-spirituals and their invariant litany of platitudes and banalities. Social media forums are platforms for the socially inept and lonely hearts bereft of attention. In essence, the primary product of the Internet is useless time-wasting.
While the Internet can be a source of untapped potential like research and education, it inevitably piles up loads of stinking refuse and inconsumable garbage, eclipsing the nourishment. It becomes a place far more predicated on softening the mind rather than strengthening it.
A wild, unregulated, potent landscape is always a beautiful place to begin with. But the inhabitation and eventual overpopulation of "society" has always left these Elysian Fields irrevocably plundered and defiled. Same goes for the Internet: it, too, will become gorged to repletion with pollution-spewing denizens. Eventually it begins to stink like all overpopulated places.
— Kyle Tyrrell, Glenview
5. Conceal-carry fears
I grew up in the 1990s, and I thought times were violent then. I had no idea what the 2000s would bring.
I don't know if it's just an expansion of media coverage, or I'm more aware than I was when I was younger, but I can't comprehend the amount of violence and the kinds of violence I see and read about.
For the first time I noticed the no-guns-allowed sticker outside the library, and I couldn't believe I was actually seeing it. I never could imagine such a sign.
They say not to be scared, that more people carrying guns will empower victims and counteract crime. But for some uncanny reason, I don't believe that.
For some reason, those no-gun signs scare me more than ever.
I guess I should trust the legislators who proposed and passed the conceal-carry law and assume they are fighting for a better city.
But some foreboding feeling still haunts me, like a stir in a dark chamber of the mind.
Maybe it's just foolishness on my part, and the solution all along was carrying weapons around to prevent crime.
I don't know what to think really. I just hope people use their best judgment before they pull their guns.
— Kyle Tyrrell, student, DePaul University, Chicago
As a journalism student at DePaul University, primed to graduate in June and get set loose on this chaotic world, I must say I have never been more proud to be a journalist.
It’s a rough and violent time for journalists across the globe.
The ones who came before me stood up to dictators, rapists, criminals and terrorists. They risked their lives and their freedom for a chance to expose the hideous people of this Earth for what they truly are.
Journalists have taken down presidents and global corporations. They carry with them the most powerful machine of all: the truth.
Journalists continually enforce the power of the pen — so long as the ink within the pen spurts out the truth.
Freedom of speech, as outlined in the Constitution’s First Amendment, is one of the most beautiful and liberating clauses ever written. It guarantees more than just basic human rights; it opens the world up to higher consideration, contemplation and an impetus toward challenging antiquated thoughts that still exist.
Right now, free speech rights are abolishing the primitive myopia of anti-gay and anti-women rights.
Free speech led to the discussions about abolishing slavery and allowing women to vote — about the real meaning of “all men are created equal.”
Without an open market of free thoughts and free rhetoric to shoot down anachronistic thoughts, there is no freedom, only despotism and oppression.
Now back to journalists, the ones who are risking their lives reporting from terrorist states, caliphates and totalitarian theocracies: Thank you for your fearless work. I hope to be able to live up to the integrity and multilateral thinking you all are beholden to. I hope to challenge people who live in the past with their beliefs. I hope to make people like that extremely uncomfortable.
I recently attended a Chicago Community Trust dinner at DePaul University. I am happy to say that 30 students showed up and, guided by devoted professors, we came up with some ideas that would transform discussions into actions.
There is much lamentation and condemnation of the blights of violence and an inept Chicago Public Schoolssystem, yet nobody has time in his or her busy life to actually do anything about it.
We wanted to devote some classes purely to community service within Chicago. We felt that the individualist culture in America leaves little time for service. We are all so consumed with building our own lives and setting things in place to secure our own futures, that we don't have enough time to give back.
But it is imperative to find time because the underprivileged residents in Chicago are falling lower and lower into an abyss from which it is almost impossible to climb out. Soon they may be lost in the darkness of history.
As a college student, with the means to secure a life for myself, I am making an attempt this summer to get involved with community service -- despite the little time I have left in between internships, job and summer classes. I know if it were me in that situation -- living in a battered neighborhood with terrible schools and a dark future in front of me -- I would be dreaming of someone to come help me. I would be wishing for a millionaire to give my destitute family some money.
I'm not sure yet what exactly I can do, but if enough people divest themselves and can abstract themselves from their busy lives to give back, it could create momentum. That momentum could lead to a monumental movement. And we need it before we all but lose the underprivileged children who right now might be contemplating turning to a life of violence and crime.
-- Kyle Tyrrell, Glenview, student, DePaul University
