Today there were King Tides in the Bay Area. I wonder about tides pulled by the moon and what makes anomalies. I wonder. I stay in conversation with the universe. There are explanations for most anomalies. As humans we often deal in band-aids rather than solutions. Climate change is encouraging the anomalie of King Tides. What encourages the climate of violence in North America?

Today a young white man killed 25+ people including himself, some of the dead are elementary school kids, all this happened in a haven where white people who can hide their children away from the lived realities of ghetto children who attend schools surrounded by police cars, some with metal detectors. Our schools in the inner city  look like prisons. You can’t walk on campus. But surely there must be some safe places in America? There must still be open spaces where some kids can still be kids free of the traumas associated with spaces like our urbanscapes which we have grown to  expect to be violent.

Yet the horrors wrought in a country where a young man that looks like my sons is killed every 36 hours still caught up with them. They were unsafe in their safe place, they were not on ghetto streets, these children will not be demonized by a complicit media, they are being mourned nationally,  as they should be. But the events are equally significant, equally horrifying, both the fact of a young man of color dying every thirty-six hours and mass shootings are unacceptable harbingers of a broken society.

The airwaves are full of the news of the mass murders. Not so with the obscene statistic: A man of color dies a violent death in this country every 36 hours.

The lights are on everywhere in Newtown tonight. This small haven feels for a moment as bereft as the homes of children of color who are falling like rain across this tormented country.

Founded in violence.
Going forward in violence.
Maintained in violence.
Crippled by violence.

They say this shooter has mental problems.

All shooters have mental problems.

All violently interrupted lives matter, no mother’s tears weigh any less than any others.

The country is crazy. The populace reflects the mental health of the nation state. We live in fear. We export it. We are violent. We kill. We do not care for our ill or our poor. We debate the necessity of safety nets. Thus there is no safety.

Ain’t no safety. What we do to the least, the sick, the ill, the hungry, the poor, our criminals, what we do to those people– we do to us all. It reflects who we are as a nation. It shows what we value. It shapes who we can be. This is the society we are building one unimaginable travesty at a time.

I sit in sorrow for all those who died today and their families, and the couple shot in Philly a few days ago by the police — 136 rounds into a parked car, and that young man killed because his music was too loud for that man who felt like he was entitled to stand his ground in Florida.

Sorrowfully I repeat there is no safety here until we do for all what we need for ourselves. We have built the world we suffer in either by our action or lack thereof.

Stand up for tomorrow. Do it today.

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(Davy D)

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Chicago Homicides Top War Deaths – Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/16/chicago-homicide-rate-wor_n_1602692.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false

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