We’re Killing Each Other
It’s hard to talk about this. There is an immediacy to urban violence, its proximity to our lives, and a horror at its effect, that can silence our conversations before they begin.
If you haven’t experienced gun violence, it’s easy to feel like you can’t relate. Like you don’t belong in the conversation, or don’t have the legitimacy to offer any solutions.
Not true. The fact is, we make it even harder to act by trying to ignore gun violence in our communities. We push it to the fringe, when the fact is that no one deserves to be killed, especially not a kid in the streets, and if you’re alive, if your heart is beating and your lungs breathing, then it is up to YOU to change the culture of violence in America.
We have to stop glorifying gangsters. We need to beat our pistols into plowshares, because violence, urban murder, spreads like fire. It is a threat to every single one of us. It is a violation of our deepest, most important sense of morality, and there’s nothing else to say about it.
We need to act. Many of us are; check out these videos, both of which come out of Seattle, Washington. Both videos are made by local kids whose communities don’t have the luxury of calling gun violence an ‘issue to address.’ This is life, for them.
If it’s not your life, how are you supposed to feel?
Lucky. And unified. Because it could be me, and because it could be me, I have to raise my voice, whoever I am, wherever I am, to whoever I can, so that there’ll be one less gun manufactured, one less future cut short by a piece of machinery whose sole purpose is the destruction of life.
Today’s Artist: Rafael Casal
Rafael Casal is a poet from the Bay Area who went public when he was fifteen and has been slinging his style of dramatic, personal poetry ever since. He’s the youngest artist to appear on Russell Simmon’s Def Poetry and is an underground superstar.
Rafael uses his poetry and music to take on the biggest issues of life today. All it takes is a camera, a keyboard or a mic to put your own voice online, and Casal is an inspiration to all artist activists, all of us who feel a tremor in our chests and need a platform to express how we are hurting, and how we’re gonna heal.
