Bigger Pictures…

My mother graduated from Fenger High School on the south side of Chicago.
I took my Kaplan College Prepatory classes at Fenger High School on the south side of Chicago.
My family’s home is a short walk away from Fenger High School on the south side of Chicago.
Derrien Albert was beaten to death.
He was a student at Fenger High School on the south side of Chicago.
He was killed down the street from Fenger High School on the south side of Chicago.

Sigh.

I wasn’t going to blog about this.
I wasn’t going to blog about it because Derrien isn’t the first child to lose his life outside of a Chicago high school.  He isn’t the catalyst to some great movement of awareness.  He is probably number 95 or so, in a three year period.  His death is on the forefront because there is video, and there were no guns involved, and he was an honor student.  But please don’t be deceived.  Chicago has been asking for help, for a long time.

My sister is a graduate of Percy L. Julian high school on the south side of Chicago.  The year she was a senior, she lost FOUR classmates.  Four.  And the city, lost about 30 of our students.  They died on busses.  They died protecting friends.  They died on school grounds.  They died over birthday cakes.  They died after sporting events.

They died.  They were honor students.  They were struggling students.  They were teenagers, middleschoolers….babies.

And I’m angry.

I’m angry because here I sit, along with a large portion of women all over this country, PLEADING with fate to give me a child.  We medicate ourselves, and inject ourselves, and humiliate ourselves, just for the ability to procreate.  To bring life to this world.  And to think, of these children’s parents, and to imagine how much they must have wanted these babies, and for someone else to take that precious life that you worked so hard for,….
it pauses me.

This blog is staccato.  My feelings are as well.  My thoughts are coming in short spurts of sentences, so that is what I’m writing.

We have to do more with the babies who are already here, to ensure that there is a world worth bringing a new life into.

My mother tells me, “I don’t know why these babies are so angry!  I don’t remember being that angry at their age”.  And I can understand where she’s coming from.  But her two-parent, three kids and a dog, stay at home mom with dinner on the table every night childhood is laughable in relation to the life of this generation who is void of physical intimacy from parents, lacking spiritual and emotional guidance and support, and in MANY cases the by-products of drug and violence-induced conception.

I would be angry too, if I were born with a drug addiction that I didn’t choose, in a household that OPENLY told me how unwanted I was, to parents who are too young or thoughtless to provide me with basic social-emotional skills, and usually no money to provide otherwise to any of the above.  I would be incensed.

And these children are.  They were born with no hope, so how can we expect to hope for greatness from them?  They have no mentors, no fathers or father-figures, no one willing to stop being their friend and be the disciplinarians and guides they need to be.

Whatever happened to the line between adult and child?  I need these adults to do more.  If you see a child in need, help them.  Be that father where there is none.  Be that mother when its needed.  Be the person that some child wants to emulate.  When you see better, you know better, and when you know better, you do better.

As this is a blog directed towards empowering the building of strong African -American families, I implore you, whoever you are, to take heed.  There is no point in spending thousands of dollars in infertility treatments, or hundreds of pills in your body, only to have a child who will be lost to this society anyway.  DO SOMETHING.  If your house was on fire, wouldn’t you at least call 911?

Get a bucket, the black family is burning.