Witnessing Violence

I suspect the scene will haunt me for some time to come.  A young man, defibrillation leads attached uselessly to his chest, gunshot wounds in his torso, dead in a pool of his own blood.

I, of course, caught the least of it.

Mine was not the life that was ended so suddenly.  I wasn't the one who got up on Friday morning, fully expecting to go to bed on Friday night, only to be shot down in the street.  I'm not the grieving father, wailing over his son's body.  I'm not the cousin desperately juggling her two small children while trying to find out what happened to her relative.  I'm not even the woman who was led away from the scene, crying and traumatized, having witnessed the shooting itself.

I'm just a neighbor who witnessed the aftermath.  I'm just one of the people who had to leave the streetcar because its route was blocked by the crime scene, and therefore had to walk past it to get home.  I'm even less affected than the dozens of people staring in horror at what happened right in front of their homes.

I'm left wondering who could do such a thing.  I know that murders happen every day, that there are places in the world where violence happens on a worse scale than a single murder (and that this violence is often perpetrated at the hands of my own government).  But who could do such a thing?  Who could end someone else's life like that?

Oddly, I find myself asking myself -- over and over again --  how the killers could fail to consider the number of people whose lives would be changed irrevocably by their action.  I ask myself this, even though the kind of people who could shoot another human being are obviously not the kind of people who give a damn about the aftermath.  They don't care any more for the young man's family, for the people who witnessed the crime, or for the neighbors who are shaken to the core, than they cared for the life they took.  Obviously.  They're the kind of people who can and did kill someone in cold blood.

I don't feel like this shooting makes me less safe in my neighborhood.  When violence goes down in my here, it's inevitably a young black man who dies, and always at close range.  The death is blamed on gang activity, though the victim is not always a gang member.  Sometimes the shooters mistake their victim's identity.  Oops.

But it seems to me that blaming the crime on "gang activity" is a way of washing our hands of it.  Those gangs; what are you going to do?  I'm doubtful that the police investigate these shootings with the care they'd take if the victims were a different color, if there weren't that label of "gang violence" associated with them.  After all, I suspect that this is one reason why these shootings happen at close range.  The killers know that accidentally shooting someone like me would have repercussions.  This makes me angry.

Since witnessing that crime scene, I find I'm less tolerant of our culture's practice of portraying violence in the name of entertainment.  How many of the people who make that choice have ever seen what I saw?  How many of them have known someone who was murdered?  How many of them have lost a family member to violence?  Not many, I suspect.  Those people probably live in better neighborhoods, neighborhoods that are far removed from tragedies like the one I witnessed.

Something needs to change.  As a society, we need to stop glorifying violence.  We need to give our young men something to do, a way they can contribute to their communities.  We need to take the murders of young black men as seriously as we would anyone else.  We need a justice system that heals, restores, and rehabilitates, rather than one that turns people into harder, more violent people than they were to begin with.

Thus endeth the preaching.  Now I need to go figure out how to heal from what I saw.