Boys Gone Wild
In an historic church in Charleston, one white boy murdered nine African Americans–people–after they’d invited him to join their prayer group, and in Atlanta another murdered six Asian Americans who had been providing something simple as a human touch to other humans.
In an historic church in Charleston.
In separate strip malls of no consequence outside Atlanta.
Because Jesus told the one boy? Because no one helped the other one’s brain work better? Think about that. What screwed up places raised these boys?
The church in Charleston had been burned before the Civil War in 1822. That same year men were hung for being Black. The church was rebuilt after the war. And their survivors kept praying. A woman friend of mine told me a relative of hers died in that rabid White boy’s attack.
Asians in Atlanta suffered, so was that massacre aimed at Asians? An assault against women, no question, above all it was an assault against humanity.
What is it about sexuality that makes some go crazy? If I pay you to touch me, how does that take from your kindness? If you are confused in your life, does that lessen your kindness? If you are lost to your true worth, does that make your touch something to be obliterated?
Seems that Georgia boy couldn’t control himself, so he took it out on the women he could strike. Some hero. Did the boy witness something growing up that made him that way? Was the need of a touch or its lack so terrible he had to destroy women — Asian women — Any women?
Did he think his preacher taught him that?
Now ask that of the boy who sprayed bullets with his hate in a Charleston church already born of a sad history. He might easily have passed his victims on the street, nodding, ‘hi’ and ‘hi’ in return. He sat next to them before he began shooting.
He sat among them.
He breathed the same air, while he sat among them.
He sat among them.
Society does not expect you to love a stranger the way you should your own family. You may frown on another whose life isn’t the life you yourself wish to lead. You don’t have to believe all people deserve equality, or that women and men are the same. Simply abiding by society’s dictates will suffice.
But this physical infliction of your mental pain on others, those who are unknown to you, they who never deserved it, what sermon, what Bible, what Quran, what Sutra, where is that preached?
When we fail our children–because we are fallible–let us not fail them so badly as these boys were failed.
