We are seeing a lot of different reactions to the tragic shooting at the Morris Jeff graduation yesterday afternoon that left Augustine Greenwood, an 80 year old grandmother of 15, dead from a stray bullet to the head, just moments after she saw her youngest grandchild receive his diploma. One reaction that kind of struck me was made by Mayor Cantrell - she says that gun violence is a disease.
I don't agree. Gun violence is not the disease. The disease is impaired judgment. The disease is the inability to handle conflict resolution. The disease is the lack of emotional intelligence - that’s the ability to manage one's own emotions and the emotions of others. We want to place blame not on society and individuals, but instead an inanimate object by which one carries out the evil in their heart.
I'm sick and tired of hearing the excuses, one after the other after the other, explaining any number of issues away in order to place blame on an inanimate object. Shame on us! Shame on all of us, because if we really believe that we are going to change the world, change society, without changing the manner in which we interact with one another, and by instead attacking and outlawing an inanimate object, we are sadly mistaken.
To not call out the violence in our streets each and every day, to not hold people accountable, to continue to make excuses for them over and over and over again, to not have accountability for bad behavior in our society is a joke. And if we believe that there's someone with enough time and money to affect this change in the short term, they're selling you a pig in a poke. And if you're buying into that, you're a fool because it's not going to happen.
We keep trying to deflect away from what's actually driving the crime across this country. We have people who just have a desire to do what they want, when they want, how they want, and they don't care how it's going to impact the lives of others in society. And we have soundbite politicians out there making excuses for them. It's just simply the manner in which we're raising our kids. We can't discipline kids in school. We can't call parents to school. We cannot hold them accountable. We want to shield juveniles from being chastised in society for their bad behavior. So we hide their records, and we think that they're gonna be rehabilitated by some kind of mystical intervention. I call it mystical because we don't have those programs that are statewide anywhere in the country. For the most part, we allow it to go on at a local level, and some jurisdictions are fortunate enough to be able to finance it. Others, not so much. And we think that we're gonna live in this parochial bubble and we're gonna be able to survive all of this.
No one's taking a breath, creating pause, and actually intellectually looking at what is going on in society. We've already surpassed the number of murders in 2019 in this city in just five months, shootings are amok across the state and throughout this country - the disease is the inability to resolve conflict. We want to focus on the inanimate object. We do not want to focus on what's actually happening out on the streets and why these things are occurring. Why is it so wrong to hold people accountable because they are not able to conform to societal norms and obey the law? I'd love to hear from somebody out there that has an explanation for that. That's what laws are all about, the codification of societal norms.
We want to bypass the ills of society and go straight to the inanimate object. And then again, only one object. So one has to ask - what is the intent? What is this truly about? I would suggest to you that this is about deflection. It's about deflection from looking at ourselves in the mirror and being honest with ourselves as to what is actually driving violence in this country.
That’s the disease. And we won’t find the cure without admitting that we are sick.
