My son, Shawn has a special place in his heart for jazz. It began when he first picked up a trumpet. He learned to play jazz. He learned its stories and those who created it, played it and lived it. We had taken him to the Jazz museum in Kansas City, and to Beall Street in Memphis Tennessee, where he borrowed a trumpet from a wonderful black man and jammed with him. Shawn can tell seemingly endless stories about Louis Armstrong, and Charlie Parker and a hundred others in the same way that I have gathered Civil War stories, names, dates and battles.
Last fall, My son took me with him to the University of Chicago where he was taking a graduate class in conjunction with his Master's degree at Purdue University. We drove through miles of Chicago Suburbs, ande Shawn told me stories of jazz and the blacks who made it live as we drove. I live in Las Vegas, Nevada and have worked with a veritable "United Nations" during my years in retail and am used to working with all sorts of folk but that morning my son and I were the only people of our race that I saw for the better part of an hour. Then suddenly, we drove through a park, entered the University of Chicago and once again there was diversity.
This morning I was reading the morning's news online. I read that four students were under arrest for beating another youth to death in Roseland, a Chicago suburb, near the path of last year's morning drive. The thing was, that someone had taken a cell phone video of the gang war that killed the young man. Suddenly, with a left click below my laptop mouspad, I witnessed the murder of Derrion Albert.
Last Thursday Derrion, a 16 year old honor student was walking to the Agape Center where he did Bible Study. He never got there. Instead he ended up between two gangs. In the ensuing brawl, Derrion was beaten to the ground by another black teenager swinging part of a splintered railroad tie. When he trie to get up another teen hit him with another board. He was then kicked and beaten as he lay senseless on the ground. His friends dragged him to the Agape center but it was too late to save him.
I thought I had been shaken by the experience of watching his death and then I read the comment below, about Derrion's death, in the Huffington Post.
"This is why I believe in unfettered access to abortion. If just one of the four young men who beat Darrion to death had not been born, Darrion might be here. The loss of a future felon might have prevented this horrific tragedy."
"Parents like Darrion's mom are clearly swimming upstream alone. My heart breaks for his mother, and the other four mothers have nothing but my disdain and hatred. If they had wanted to do the world a favor they never would have brought four unwanted, utterly useless lives into the world. Nothing these young men do from this day forward will make up for the atrocity they committed. I don't want to stand next to them on a train, cross paths with them in a store, or defile my own being by carrying out a death sentence."
"Clearly the four young men involved in this atrocity were not monitored by their parents they way they should have been. I will certainly be giving generously to Planned Parenthood, because there is no reason that unwanted and unloved children should be loosed on society to kill those who would do good."
"I would be ashamed before my neighbors if any of my sons ever behaved in such a fashion. It would pain me immeasurably to think that I had brought forth such a loser, and here we have four."
So this poster would multiply the cruelty and horror of Derrion's death by making him a poster child for the abortion movement. Words fail me.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
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