Skokie: not the butt of your joke

Two people at work are discussing the merits and demerits of living in Humboldt Park/Logan Square in the cubicle across from me, and they are assuring each other of the neighborhood's safety except for "one time," as one of them recalls, when there was a shooting on his block that involved one neighbor killing another with an AK-47. "Well, those things happen," clucks the other sympathetically. Really? A few minutes later, over some other aspect of the neighborhood, one of them says, "Well, at least it's not Skokie!" And the other vigorously agrees and they chuckle together. But really, I think the joke is on them. Skokie may not be all hip and trendily run-down and ethnically contentious, but at least in Skokie, we do not shoot each other with submachine guns. So there.