Tragedy and my older friends

 

Last week's tragedy in Charleston is heartbreaking for the nation.  Its impact on my older friends, particularly my friends who live in "enhanced living" residences, is impossible to fathom.  

It's not just the usual sense of concern I have over the news of a tragedy being blared at them throughout the day.  Praise be, in at least one grannie client's residence, two of the three over-sized screens in the casual dining room are dark - apparently not working.  

Whether they actually are malfunctioning or if management realized this is NOT a story you want being blared all day, I am grateful they are off.  Because for many of my older friends, the story of the tragedy at Charleston's Emanuel AME church could easily stir memories from their youths & young adult years, particularly memories of 1963's bombing of the 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham, AL.

It didn't matter if you were for or against the Civil Rights movement - a bombing that killed four little girls ripped up hearts.  It wasn't an accident, the four little girls weren't "in the wrong place at the wrong time" - it was Youth Day at the church, so the bomber(s)  knew the victims would most likely be children.  

Across the nation, hearts broke for the families, for the lives never lived.  

Many of my older friends were young fathers & mothers back then.  The deaths of those little girls touched their lives, made them hold their own children a little closer.  A sense of the violence that was everyday reality in the South suddenly became real to people in Iowa & Maine, New Mexico & South Dakota.  Much like the hatred that's currently found in "White Supremacist" web sites became all too real for us after the deaths of Pastor Pinckney & members of his flock.  

 
This past week, just as the youth of the dead at the 16th Street Baptist church cracked open many hearts, the ages of the dead at the Emanuel AME church broke open millions upon millions:  

• Tywanza Sanders, 26
• Rev Clementa Pinckney, 41
• Rev Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45
• Rev Depayne Middleton-Doctor, 49
• Cynthia Hurd, 54
• Myra Thompson, 59
• Ethel Lance, 70
• Rev Daniel Simmons Sr, 74
• Susie Jackson, 87
•  

 

From someone young enough to be a grannie client's granddaughter to ones who are the same age as their children to ones who could have been a contemporary, a friend - the ages grab at hearts previously untouched by the reality of being black in America.  

Yes, I am massively grateful that two of the three over-sized screens in the casual dining room are dark, aren't blaring news of this horrific tragedy at my older friends as they eat their shrimp cocktail & chopped sirloin.  

I live in Pennsylvania, not Alabama or South Carolina.  Many of my older friends were part of the Civil Rights movement, some were Freedom Riders, others fought for equal rights in other ways.  In talking with them, am torn up inside at the sadness in their eyes, the sense of...  I don't know the word, at seeing what is unfolding before us.

And it makes me mad.  It makes me furious.  It makes me want to howl at the moon & to throw the stickiest lemon meringue pie I can find straight at the expensive suits worn by Roger Ailes & Rupert Murdoch.  

While Dylann Roof might have been deeply influenced by the White Supremacist web sites littering the internet, so many in our culture have been quietly radicalized against African-Americans via Fox News & even The Wall Street Journal.  Forget their fear & loathing of President Obama - just look at their reaction to the deaths at the Emanuel AME church.   

Fox News insisted until they couldn't insist any more without looking like utter fools & radicals that the killings were related to hatred of Christians, tied the murders to an antipathy toward religion they laid at President Obama's feet.  And Fox News is the station the majority of elderly Americans - black & white - listen to throughout the day because the engaging faces & voices fill an aching social void in the lives of too many older people.  Fox is designed to appeal to that aching void.  

As for the jaw-dropping WSJ editorial, which I will not give the additional coverage of a link - at least it clearly identified the problem our nation faces with both Fox News & The Wall Street Journal:  instead of news coverage, we get denial denial denial.  

This morning, I wrote a posting on another blog about a young Alabama lawyer named Charles Morgan, Jr. who gave an astonishing talk to the Birmingham Young Men's Business Club on the morning after the 16th Street Baptist church bombings - and was ostracized from his community for it.  Well, folks at Roger Ailes' & Rupert Murdoch's Fox News ostrichcize news, burying their collective heads in the sand as it refused to acknowledge that hatred of African-Americans was at the heart of the shootings.

What is interesting about the Emanuel AME church murders is how little I hear it talked among my older friends.  My guess is it goes too deep.  Praise be the screens were dark last night - may they stay so forever.  Because everyday life can be enough of a challenge for my older friends - handling the heartbreak of Charleston...  it might be more than they can bear.