A Tense Scene in Riverside

The rest of the world’s news seemed fairly uneventful by recent standards, so the big news on Tuesday in our fashionable Riverside neighborhood of Wichita, Kansas, was the massive law enforcement presence just a couple of blocks to the north and a block to the west.

There were five Wichita Police Department patrol cars already in the area as we headed out on an afternoon chore, once of which stopped just ahead of us and blocked our way, as the cops around here are particularly fussy about citizens driving around, but he waved us ahead and we waved our thanks as we passed. By the time we drove home there were several more WPD patrol cars, a similar number of patrol cars from the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Department, at least one from the Kansas Highway Patrol, a few heavily armored vehicles, and numerous men in full combat gear wielding actual assault rifles, and not just the semi-automatic kind that the gun-grabbers like to call “assault rifles” but the real deal.

Which is not at all what we usually see on a drive home. Most Riverside homes aren’t all that fancy, but almost all of them have a certain unpretentious 20th century charm, and they’re all nestled between the Arkansas and Little Arkansas Rivers — both pronounced “Are-Kansas,” by the way — with several public parks and the art museum and the botanical gardens and a disc golf course and a real golf course, so it’s a fashionable neighborhood with all sorts of arty types and more than the usual number of of delightfully neighborly homosexuals, and it’s usually quiet and quite placid. We had a bike swiped from a back porch once, and a long while ago the “Riverside rapist” was terrorizing the neighborhood, and there’s the usual graffiti and other low-level crime you’d expect in the heart of any large American city, but in more than 25 years here we’ve never seen anything that so closely resembled a battleground.

We didn’t see any cars marked with the logos of any of the local media, which wasn’t surprising, given the late hour and the budget-cutting state of the local media. Once upon a time we’d have run down the street and flashed our credentials at the big city newspaper and demanded to know what was going on, but these days we’re not considered considered credentialed by the local authorities and don’t run very well, and the cops around here can be impatient with citizens asking question.

By happenstance one of our Facebook friends and actual friends lives exactly a few blocks north one and one block west where it was happening, and he’s one of those video-phone-owning and Facebook-posting types, so he was providing live coverage of it all from his porch. He could provide no explanation for anyone of it in his audio commentary, but had plenty of expletives to describe what was going on, and it indeed did look at least that curse worthy crazy. He posted that the cops were asking if he could use his bathroom, and we posted a question about what he’d learned, but he didn’t answer, and for all we know he told them to go around back and thus blew a journalistic scoop. Our friend’s a good guy, but he’s the type who might do that.

The first reporting from a credentialed local news source came from radio station KNSS, which did not surprise us. For most of the day KNSS is right wing talk radio and late night shows about the supernatural and unidentified flying objects and weird conspiracy theories, along with a lot of ads for tax debt experts and hail damage repair and other businesses, but they always fit a few timely and reliable minutes of reporting into every hour. It ranges from everything about the traffic tie-up at Kellogg and the Canal Route to the latest shenanigans at City Hall, and they gainfully employ our pal Ted Woodward, whose honesty and good intentions we will vouch for, even if it’s our personal opinion they’re working him into an early grave. They still maintain 24-hour shifts, too, which comes in handy when there are routine severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings or a very unusual amassing of military fire power down one’s block.

According to KNSS it all has something to do with a man who has a handgun and is “having a mental health crisis,” and we’re inclined to believe it. The poor suckers pulling the late shift at KNSS are usually pretty reliable, the cops around here aren’t inclined to lie to them, and these days it’s not hard to believe that there’s someone with a handgun and a mental health crisis just a few blocks away, even here in the fashionable Riverside neighborhood of Wichita.

Sorry to leave our readers in suspense, but for now we’ve no idea how this turns out. At this late hour we haven’t heard any gunfire, which is heartening, but even in our modern media age, where we all think we instantaneously know everything that’s going on in the world, that’s all we know about what’s going on a few blocks away. According to the latest report from the usually reliable 24-hour news team at KNSS, “police will provide an update on the situation Wednesday morning.”

— Bud Norman

Democracy at the Local Level

Tuesday was an election day here in Wichita, with the primary for mayor and three city council seats and an at-large seat on the school board at stake, so of course we did our civic duty and drove several blocks to a church up in North Riverside to cast our vote. Voting is a long ingrained habit of ours, even in these low turnout contests, and we are creatures of habit.

There’s always a certain satisfaction in exercising one’s franchise, but it’s changed over the years. When we were kids our elementary school was a voting place, and the Monday before every election day we’d get to go into the booths with the red handle that closed the curtains and click on the levers to cast our mock ballots for the candidates our parents had endorsed. Back then no one doubted the election results, and everyone accepted them no matter how it turned out, and there was something very Norman Rockwell about the process.

Nowadays you need a driver’s license or some other sort of photographic identification that they scan through a machine, which is fine by us, but we notice that doesn’t reassure those who are convinced illegal immigrants are deciding the elections. They also hand you a couple of computer printouts you run through a couple of computers in order to vote, which strikes us as rather convoluted, and we notice it also hasn’t done much to bolster public faith in the electoral process. The same anti-immigrant Secretary of State who got the photo ID requirement enacted resisted a system with a paper trail that could counter any foreign computerized meddling in Kansas elections, and we can’t blame our Democratic friends for being suspicious about that.

Another thing that’s changed is the media landscape, which is not as useful as it used to be in making our choices. The local newspaper is down to about 20 newsroom employees, the three local television statements are similarly understaffed and preoccupied with car wrecks and local crimes, and it’s hard to find any information about the various candidates. They still do the thumbnail sketches where the candidates get to say all the same things about good government and honest dealing, but that’s about it. Somehow we were unaware of the race for the at-large seat on the school board, which we care about even though we’re long out of school and have no kids, and were embarrassed to cast no vote in the race.

We follow local politics as best we can, though, and made our choice accordingly. One of the mayoral candidates ran ads on the talk radio stations that described a platform of repairing the city’s sidewalks and making Wichita a sanctuary city for the unborn, but we’ve not noticed the sidewalks in a state of disrepair and wonder how fetuses might find their way to sanctuary here, and he flier that showed him next to an embarrassed-looking President Donald Trump was another reason to write him off. Several of the candidates were the usual kooks who always run for local office, and only the incumbent and a couple of challengers seemed like serious people with relevant credentials.

Incumbent Mayor Jeff Longwell has generally done a good job, and Wichita being such a small town and ourselves being so well connected  we personally know him to be a nice enough guy with a very charming wife, but he tore down our beloved Lawrence-Dumont Stadium and ran off our beloved Wichita Wingnuts to build a shiny new ballpark and attract a Major League-affiliated team, in a deal that gave some businessman or another some recently hot Delano property for a dollar a lot, and there’s no forgiving that. The two non-kook challengers were Lyndy Wells and Brandon Whipple, both businessmen with long lists of the boards and commissions of local agencies and charities they’ve served on. A former city councilwoman we always thought too liberal for our tastes but whose honesty we never doubted knocked on our door to to make a pitch for Wells, our very conservative businessman friend “Hatman” Jack Kellogg, who has lots of dealings with the city government, also endorsed Wells, and when a couple of trusted  realtor friends made the same recommendation we settled on Wells.

Not that we had anything against Whipple, who wound up slightly behind Longwell in the race for the two slots in November’s run-off. We can’t be sure that Whipple was a Wingnuts fan, or that he’ll be any less likely than the usual Wichita politician to go knocking down perfectly good buildings to erect something more shiny or new, but except in the unlikely case that what’s left of the local media comes up with some pretty serious dirt on him he’ll probably get our vote. If Longwell wins we figure Wichita could do a lot worst, as so many big cities seem to do.

So long as we get to vote, we’ll retain an optimistic feeling. While voting we ran into a longtime friend who lives down the street who had come to vote and brought his soon-to-be-third-grade son along to demonstrate what civic-minded citizens do on election day, and when they accepted a cookie and an “I voted” sticker from the nice lady at the door he thanked her for volunteering her time to democracy and had his son do the same, and that also gave us a hopeful feeling.

Here’s hoping the kid winds up with the best possible person serving in the at-large seat on the school board, no thanks to us or the local media.

— Bud Norman