End this scourge that has left a trail of blood and tears

This week’s column is a follow-up to my June 23 column. I wrote then about violence amid the recent national discussions on reparations for the descendants of black American slaves.

In the name of Tyesa Cherry, 16, stop the killing.

In the names of Dantrell Davis, 7, Robert “Yummy” Sandifer, 11, Hadiya Pendleton, 15, Kaylyn Prior, 20, Heaven Sutton, 7, Tanaja Stokes, 8, and countless other black children murdered in Chicago and in neighborhoods across America, where gunfire and the spilled blood of our children has become passé, stop the killing.

In the name of Frances Colon, 18. (I promised her mother I would never forget.) Stop the violence.

In the name of peace. For the children’s sake. For neighborhoods filled mostly with innocent people forced to live in the valley of the shadow of death, stop the killing.

As a journalist, I have stood in the county morgue cooler, where the bodies of young black men lay with orange toe tags — weekend carnage. At the scene of more human devastation than I care to recall.

I have written the stories of 6-month-old Rashonda Flowers, mortally wounded in the head while her mother pushed her in a stroller; of Helen Foster-El, a 55-year-old grandmother fatally shot in the back in Southeast Washington, D.C., after pushing the last child to safety when gunfire erupted.

And I have arrived at the point of believing there to be no more imminent and critical issue confronting Black America than to end this scourge that has left a trail of blood and and tears with hundreds of thousands of casualties, leaving exponentially more severely traumatized.

Murder has become routine in some American neighborhoods. Gunfire as inevitable as the sunrise.

Beyond the killing zone, news of the latest shooting is often met with a sigh, with the shaking of the head about the way “those people live over there.” Once I was one of “those people over there.”

Most people over there are good people — terrorized by a relative minority, mostly young men who open fire on rival gang members, on former friends, schoolmates or acquaintances in shootings that range from retaliations to simple social media or rap music beefs. Nothing worth killing for.

Only if you’ve lived life underneath a rock could you not know about the systemic institutional racism that black folks in America have been subjected to for 400 years.

But blaming racism and the system alone without accepting some responsibility as individuals for our current actions and also embracing self-determination leaves us without a sail, drifting hopelessly upon a raging sea with no sure destiny except our own destruction.

I would never be so naïve as to ask my oppressor — one who has slain, maimed and raped me — to now heal me. That oppressor may eventually offer reparations but can never recompense for the hell inflicted upon my soul.

In the case of slavery, only God can absolve America of that great sin, the ramifications of which we will always feel. Still, we are not powerless. Not without hope.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asked, “Where do we go from here: Chaos or community?”

That question remains. And also these: What if the cavalry never comes? What if we are all we’ve got? Can we stop the killing?

So let me clear my throat: Damn presidential politics. Damn this oversaturated news cycle with another “breaking story” about Donald Trump. Damn divisiveness, complacency, political correctness or anything else that would blur our vision from this most critical and imminent task.

In the name of Charinez Jefferson, 17, eight months pregnant and fatally shot eight times in 2014 on the South Side while pleading for her life. Stop the killing.

In the name of her son, born after his mother was shot down — a victim of violence before taking his first breath.

Email: Author@johnwfountain.com