Black death has become an addiction, a political football when convenient and a marketing tool…it is also something with each passing day can’t be ignored…If we are not bothered by this, then something is seriously wrong….Here’s a video of Hadiya in 6th grade speaking out on gangs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x60rR-CZ-A4
Below is a powerful essay from a Chicagoan who is all too familiar with the daily carnage going on in her city…
How many dead Black children does it take to get a Sandy Hook response?
15 year old Hadiya was shot and killed in a random act of violence in Chicago
Do you remember? Remember when you were young and carefree? Think back on how excited you would have been with an early dismissal from school into warm weather and a park nearby. Remember wanting to just cool out for a minute, hang on to the laughter and silly antics of your friends before heading home to chores and studying? Time travel to the time when life was so full and promising, back when you had the zeal and energy to really live it?
How old were you back then? When did that all end for you?
Well for Hadiya Pendleton 15years old was her time. A baby really, just getting her taste of life’s promises. A scholar attending King Preparatory High School on the south side of Chicago. An enthusiastic student, a member of her school’s volley ball team and it’s band that just performed at President Obama’s Inauguration, a trip to Paris on the horizon as a part of an exchange program. Young and carefree, yet it ended much too soon for Hadiya. Her young life snatched just as she was getting to the good part; her life counted in the number of children whose lives have been cut down before they could really fully create a memory.
continue reading this essay HERE
There is a spiteful arrogance that informs the attitudes of all those who isn’t willing to acknowledge that gun proliferation is a problem at all—or if it is, that only mass-armament is supposedly the only practical solution (essentially the position of NRA spokesman Wayne LaPierre). Unfettered escalation of gun manufacturing, gun access—and gun usage—cannot be divorced from being acknowledged as a core component of America’s ongoing gun-related tragedies.
Similarly sinister is the notion that the current conversation about guns should exclusively about mental health. To the degree that mental health is certainly a major issue worthy of consideration this author feels compelled to point out that political conservatives regularly rail against expansion of health care coverage, ongoing grudges against the Affordable Care Act merely being the most obvious of its manifestations. For decades now, governors and state legislators from both major parties have cut funding to publicly-supported mental health facilities. Prevention resources never seem to be a priority, but building more prisons to house the often mentally-ill perpetrators of violent crime doesn’t seem to cause much a stir.
Where the premise of self-defense is concerned, pragmatism is also lacking. More often than not, the “…from my cold dead hands” coterie offer only an absolutist position that rejects outright any form of gun-restriction legislation whatsoever, based on the premise that an Orwellian nightmare scenario will immediately begin to take place. Whenever anyone mentions the phrase “gun control”, the immediate kneejerk reaction is to assume that this means banning all firearms in all forms and issuing a nationwide confiscation campaign. Ironically, this stance provides a mutual rallying point for rural and suburban survivalists, neo-Nazis, Tea Partiers, youth gangbangers, organized crime, and Afrocentric militants alike. Curious.
This week, some honesty was delivered by former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly. Both delivered testimony to a Senate subcommittee speaking of pragmatic but firm gun policies. Giffords was gravely wounded in 2011 by a shooter who also took six lives in an abrupt killing spree outside a grocery store in Gifford’s district. http://tinyurl.com/bzk9qvo
If the let-the-status-quo-be rationale is to prevail, then it should be declared publicly that Americans are willing to give inanimate, death-dealing constructions of metal, plastic and wood more of an inherent right to exist than, well, the humans who reside here.
As of this writing, it has been roughly six weeks since a one-man shooting spree at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut took the lives of 27 people, including 20 children (the gunman, Adam Lanza, had earlier killed his mother and committed suicide as first responders arrived, bumping up the total body count to 28). In 2001, It took 35 days for the Patriot Act to be signed into law after being introduced less than two weeks after the events of the terror attacks of September 11. Shame on America if it cannot enact national gun reform in the aftermath of the latest, albeit staggered out, mass loss of its citizens.
This is so sad! -RUST
Never mention what a community debate about spirits means in the Northern Americas, but here the ongoin diilemma in postfascist Europe was and will be, …that the metaphysical battle of ‘free space’ by performin Rap lyrics out of the _Ism,…the person of artificial space was on the same ground, then all the Pop Weasel stage to audience performers, who don’t the easy A-B conversation of good support.
I feel about that diilemma only that shame, that the ‘Apache Line’ immigration talks on boulevard have as second space by street cultuire and to squat the clubs.
Only one insight of so many,….
Whats up Dave,
I know you got a lot of heart for your community.
I can tell by youer posts. As far as your posts on Spades and stuff got alot to comment aboput but just can’ t
I think you Know !!!!
Nick
See Previous pos.
Peace
ITs the truth.. (RED)
its gonna take a miracle for them to realize how serious it is. -purple
#truth. cobalt.
This is so sad-teal
wow…
Okay Davey,…respect,..for all father figures out there,..I love ma Mum for liberal poor poses of bein her Transgender warrior in labor printin money machines. Givin the Krautland KatastrophenStaat a damn fucked up of killing in more grammar the pedophiles have in Egyptology of color!
You have ya bowl,..I have called Beyond,…
Black on Black genocide while so many are caught up in all types of phony media staged entertainment..
Real pathetic overall with seeing it go down like this
@hypestyle: Your response to the situation is both well thought out, and well stated. I am glad that their are others who see the tight linkages between the epidemic of violence, the gun culture, and decades of policies of malign neglect supported by both of the major poltical parties and most of those in the corporate media. @Soul60 While I agree that we need subvert and delegitimize the “gangsta culture” that exists among many in our community, I have always cringed at the use of the term “Black on Black violence”. It reminds me of how the Black liberation struggle became misnamed as the Civil Rights Movement instead of the human rights movement, which it was. Words and language matter. Whites do not racialize their acts of violence in that way, even when such acts have obvious racial overtones by using terms such as “White on White violence” or “White on Black violence, or White on Latino violence.” They will always use the “neutral’ term “racial violence” to remove the racial onus from themselves. I believe that accepting terms such as “Black on Black violence” while it may describe the facts of many situations, has also enabled this society to compartmentalize violence as a “Black thing” which is an acceptable non-problem, until it occurs to people outside of Black neighborhoods.
Peace and I agree for sure.
change needs to take place
things really change a lot (black)
A mental change is needed on another level to leave all this ignorant,ghetto hood non-sense behind for good.