A few recent headlines:

ABC News reports on 12 major U.S. cities that broke their homicide records last year, from Portland and Louisville and Austin to Albuquerque and Philadelphia and St. Paul. Pull quote from a police official: “It’s worse than a war zone around here lately.”

Minnesota Public Radio notes that violent crime in the Twin Cities was up nearly 24% in the first half of this year. 

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A recent Washington Post story finds that homicide rates in nearly two dozen U.S. cities with recent available statistics are nearly 40% higher than pre-pandemic levels.

“It’s bad everywhere” is cold comfort when it’s worse where you live, and that ABC report didn’t include Memphis, which also set a homicide record in 2021, breaking a record set in 2020. 

In Memphis, already among America’s higher-crime major cities, this rising tide lifted a boat already perched precariously on the crest of a wave. 

Will we look back on this week as a tragic but random confluence or is bad currently getting even worse? Hard evidence is mixed. For many, this moment may make it feel that way regardless. 

Right now, in Memphis, we’re suffering — directly for some, psychologically for all — from a spate of unusual crimes in a city subjected, on a daily basis, to too many crimes that have grown to feel usual, even if they shouldn’t. The fear for some is that the unusual is now morphing into usual.

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But it’s felt that way before. 

It felt that way in 2016, when a 19-year-old shot an assault weapon into a crowd on Second Street, in the heart of Downtown, indiscriminately killing an 18-year-old honor student from Booker T. Washington High, one of three homicides in eight hours.

It felt that way a couple of years later, when the head of the Memphis Chamber of Commerce was shot and killed by teenagers while walking down Front Street. 

This is not a policy paper. I know that whatever the answers are to an American problem that’s a little bit deeper in Memphis, those answers are both hard and holistic.

Violent crime is largely a problem of troubled young men with easy access to guns, with many repeat offenders who may or may not serve long enough when convicted but who are surely not being made better in the process.

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Pick that sentence apart and a thousand intractable issues bloom from each element: The troubled young men, the guns and the modes of punishment and rehabilitation that do only the former, if even that. 

In Memphis, like in so many other American cities, those troubled young men tend to come from pockets of the city deeply under-resourced, ravaged by historical legacies of what’s been neglect at best. More often than not — and this week it’s been not — the victims are from the same communities. In those cases, the crimes — and the victims — get less attention. 

I don’t know what the answers are.

I do know this: The world is a wonderful and troubled place, and Memphis is a place in that world. 

I live in the city, on the edges of Midtown. There are much higher-crime areas of town than mine. And much lower ones. I walk my neighborhood regularly, and spend a lot of time Downtown. The most unsettled I’ve felt in a city this year came in San Francisco and Portland, where I saw more people on the street in obvious distress than I’ve seen in Memphis. Or in downtown Minneapolis, where leaving a Grizzlies-Timberwolves game late on a weekend night felt dicier than any Grizzlies game in downtown Memphis I’ve left. 

Memphis has higher crime statistics than those cities and more deeply troubled neighborhoods. Despite the horrible events of this week, I’m not convinced the daily lived experience in the most-shared sections of Memphis are any more dangerous than in the same parts of those American cities or most others. 

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The past decade or so has, in some quarters of the city, been the era of Talking Yourself Into Memphis. In other quarters, it’s been quite the opposite, but that practice has deeper, gnarlier roots. 

I prefer the former, but subscribe to neither. 

There’s been some sense this week — or maybe it’s just worry — that the moment is causing those who have talked themselves into Memphis to talk themselves out of it. To wonder if it’s worth the effort.

But the city’s most ardent boosters and noisiest internal detractors have had something in common: They’ve both suggested a Memphis more singular, more special than it really is. Memphis is an American city with American city problems. Bigger than most in some ways, but not in all.

You shouldn’t need to convince yourself that Memphis is the most beautiful land in the world for it to be worth your love or your effort. It also doesn’t have to be the troubled place that needs you to save it. It just needs to be the place you’re at.

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All places are interesting if you’re willing to be interested in them. All places are worth the work if they’re the places where you are. And all places have problems that feel intractable and may well be, but you work on them anyway. 

A good life in part means investing your love and energy in the people and places around you. All of whom are flawed and troubled in their way. All of whom are full of worth and wonder and their own particular qualities. 

I love Memphis. I wasn’t beating my chest about it before this week. I’m not cursing it now.

I’d probably love Topeka, too, if that’s where I lived. Love is as much what you give as what you find.

Living in Memphis when you could choose not to is no act of defiance or heroism. Fidelity to the city is no moral test. Leaving would be no abandonment, but also no reprieve. 

As a parent and as a Memphian, I’m happy to be here, no less so than I was a week ago. I’ll still likely encourage my kids to leave home for college. But not to flee crime. Not to flee at all. Just to take advantage of an opportunity most won’t have. To experience something new, and figure their lives out from there. 

Leaving wouldn’t give them a world without troubles, wouldn’t spare them an experience of the country’s many problems. And it wouldn’t spare you either.