One More Thing on Ferguson

This morning in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch there was a column by one of the editors of the paper, Pat Gauen, that reminded me of what I wrote in my last post about Ferguson. I thought it was interesting that a long time local had a similar experience to ours. Here it is:

My daughter Heather, visiting from her home Madison, Wis., for Thanksgiving, took me by surprise with a peculiar request: She asked me to take her to Ferguson.

All the more peculiar was the fact that this was a week ago yesterday, while the ruins of gutted businesses still smoldered from fires set barely 36 hours before.

Heather wasn’t asking just some random dad. She knew that mine had been one of the Post-Dispatch’s fingers on that community’s pulse since the shooting of Michael Brown on Aug. 9. I’m police and court editor here, which accounts for why I haven’t had much time to fill this space recently.

And Heather is not some random kid. A textbook editor by trade, she is a journalist at heart, with a substantial following for her observations — in words and pictures — on social media. She said she had been disgusted by the spin and half-truths from both sides that permeate the Internet and wanted to get some taste of the community for herself.

It likely would be, I told her based on my own visits there, a much nicer place than the impression left by national news coverage of the protests and violence. She assured me that she presumed that. I assured her that she still might be surprised. And she later admitted she was.

Her camera clicked over and over while aimed at the nice homes lining Elizabeth Avenue and on a couple passes through a South Florissant Road business district with too much charm for some temporary plywood windows to hide. The overhead “Seasons Greetings” banner that looked so incongruous in news pictures of near-riots on a Monday night was really charming when there was peace beneath it on a Wednesday afternoon.

There also were sad pictures to be taken of fallen, scorched bricks and melted beams. No photo could capture the acrid smell of just-burned buildings that until not even two days before had been producing services and products and livelihoods and taxes.

Ferguson might as well be the moon for many of my neighbors in Metro East — and perhaps for many Missourians as well. Unless you work at the sprawling Emerson Electric headquarters, it’s not really a destination town.

Yet probably most of the St. Louis region’s population has at least skimmed the community’s northern edge at one time or another, by driving Interstate 270 through north St. Louis County. It sits along the south side for a couple minutes at highway speed. The Florissant Valley campus of St. Louis Community College sits near the middle of that stretch. I’ll bet some of you just said, “So that’s where Ferguson is.”

When Heather and I visited, traffic was being diverted around the section of West Florissant Avenue made infamous in night after night of protests in August. This time, it was closed as a crime scene. It is a corridor of businesses that had nothing to do with the controversy but were set ablaze just the same after a grand jury decided not to indict white Officer Darren Wilson for killing unarmed black teenager Michael Brown.

We did not get to the site on Canfield Drive where Brown fell. It is now considered hallowed ground for victims of all police abuses everywhere, notwithstanding a wide breadth of opinions on whether Wilson was wrong or right to shoot. It was a serene spot on a sunny day when I had visited before, with flowers in the middle of the pavement amid neat apartment buildings with lush green lawns.

If you read on the Internet somewhere that this mess started in some dreary urban ghetto, it was wrong. If you read, as my daughter did, that Ferguson is a “food desert,” bereft of grocery stores, well, that’s wrong, too. A lot of what you’ve seen and heard has been driven by hearsay, hysteria and sometimes just plain lies.

Heather and I moved slowly on our tour, doubling back sometimes and reflecting on what we saw. She knows the only valuable opinions about Ferguson come from patient independent thinking — whether you’re driving the streets, reviewing grand jury evidence, reading news reports or tapping a social media world better stocked with emotions than facts.

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it best when he famously suggested: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.”