'A THREE-ALARM fire in Kensington . . . a racehorse fights for his life . . . the Phillies lose again . . . but the big story tonight is that no young black men were killed by gunfire! Peace, tranquility and functional means of dispute resolution are breaking out all over town."
This sounds silly because of its inherent exaggeration, but what we should be asking ourselves is why it is an exaggeration - and, more important, why we're not up in arms over the daily bloodshed.
The senseless murders of young black men at the hands of other young black men in Philadelphia has reached crisis proportions, but is met with silence and apathy. Where is the outrage? Where is the righteous indignation? Have we given up, or do we just not give a damn?
I hate crime statistics. In some ways, they tend to fog an issue with facts and figures that, no matter how shocking, reduce human tragedy to lifeless numbers.
But the following statistics wounded me so deeply and personally, I can't ignore them. They aren't lifeless. They represent the lost soul of a generation.
Last year, 380 Philadelphians were homicide victims, and 80 percent were killed by guns. In the same year, over 2,000 were shot.
Blessedly, the trauma units of Philadelphia's hospitals saved even more families from the ghoulish hell of identifying a loved one on a slab at the medical examiner's office. And now, the total is up to 214 people killed this year, 87 percent by guns.
Philadelphia leads the nation in the rate of homicides caused by handguns. Did you know what the No. 1 cause of death for African-American men under 35 in Philadelphia is? It isn't sickle-cell anemia, cancer or getting hit by a SEPTA bus - it's homicide.
What would happen if five tourists from Europe were gunned down in Center City over a weekend? Our community is outraged when one of our own is felled by a police officer or dragged behind a pick-up by Klansmen. Yet, when young black men are killed by their peers, which happens hundreds of times more often, the community does relatively nothing.
Are the lives of young black men only important when those lives are taken by whites? Is not fratricide even more insidious to the community as a whole?
The enemy from without is never as dangerous as the enemy from within. For reasons that escape me, we step over the bodies of hundreds of black men killed by each other, instead choosing to focus on the less-prevalent occurrence of black homicide by perceived white racism.
