Every day,
the names change, but the story is the same; another African-American or Latino
child is shot down on the streets of America. In New York City, a 4 year old
boy is killed in a crossfire. In Chicago, a promising young basketball player
is shot down a week before he was due to leave for an East coast
university. In the Bronx, a father finds his beloved 14-year-old son shot
dead in a park after he went out to play tennis. Our babies are being
slaughtered on the nation’s streets daily, so where is the same outrage that we
have for the mass killings like Aurora, Colorado and Virginia Tech?
Again, where
is the outrage when it’s us killing us?
There are so
many varied reasons for youth violence in America—from bad parenting to
extreme violence in the media to lack of jobs and opportunities to a mass
hysteria of self-hatred in the urban communities. Cities like Chicago and New
York have some of the strictest gun laws in the country, yet it does not stop
the almost daily killings. Some cities have gun buy-back programs periodically
and take a number of guns off the street, but that also does not stop the
killings. The controversial Stop-and-Frisk programs in a number of cities may
or may not help, but many people are now calling for stopping-and-frisking
automobiles from certain gun-friendly states as they enter cities like New York
and Chicago to see if they can put a dent in the Iron-Pipeline of smuggled
weapons into the streets that are sold to thugs for huge profits.
In today’s
New York Post, columnist Peggy Noonan writes an article titled, ‘Horror Show,
Neither Hollywood nor Washington does anything about violence in film’. In it
she writes how one certain popular- with-youth movie a few years back opens
with a number of people being shot point-blank in the head. Is it any wonder
why Americans, especially our youth, are so desensitized to seeing extremely violent
murder on the screens?
And speaking
of Washington, I am extremely surprised the politicians are not speaking out
more about this violence epidemic among our nation’s youth. In my opinion, if
you are going to speak out when there’s mass shootings like Aurora, you should
also speak out about the scourge of our young kids murdering each other. This
should be one of the issues of concern in the upcoming presidential election.
What we need
is a complete re-engineering of the thought process that promotes and accepts
violence of any form: murder, domestic violence, sexual abuse, child abuse…etc.
In actuality, what we are proposing is a re-boot, so to speak, of the degenerately
immoralistic culture that we now live in. This will be an extremely difficult
and time consuming endeavor, but the longest journey begins with the first
step. While many of the media outlets and community leaders are holding marches
and meetings, that are well and good, The Street Angel Project Against Youth
Violence is proposing three immediate steps that we feel are in the right
direction:
Step 1: Spreading
the ‘Stop The Violence’ Peace Ribbon (1) and this article to everyone you can.
Step 2:
Supporting our project by liking ‘The Street Angel Project Against Youth
Violence’ page on Facebook.
Step 3:
Calling for the hundreds of thousands of churches across the country to act as “Safe
Havens” and open their doors to our youth for at least one night a week where
they can peacefully enjoy being kids again.
Like a frog
in water that boils slowly, it took awhile for this problem to become an
epidemic and it will take awhile for all of us, working together, to get things
to change for the better. I am hoping to connect with and brainstorm with other
concerned Americans who are fed up and want to make an impact for change.
Together, we can come up with more solutions for this massive problem.
One
thing is certain:
My concentrated
efforts and vigilance to STOP THE VIOLENCE will only increase until this
epidemic of carnage among our young, our future, is under control.
Peace and Blessings,
Robert Batista
(1) We are not the designers or
originators of the “Stop The Violence” ribbon pictured.
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