IT’S MOURNING IN AMERICA
I’ve seen a lot of death in my line of work. Death by accident, suicide, murder; notebook filler in a long newspaper career.
The violence of a story can track you, follow you, and sometimes it finds you again.
In 1967, the grist of everyday street reporting was minus today’s grisly murder by multiplication.
Death was all in a day’s work, oftentimes gory story talk at a beer bar.
Then, in November 1978, an assignment to cover a cult massacre in Jonestown, Guyana, changed the way I looked at the abacus of death.
The sudden sight of more than 900 sun-swollen American bodies scattered in agonizing clumps across a grassy field; who had been lured from California by a madman named Jim Jones and led on a death walk to vats of cyanidelaced Kool-Aid, was overwhelming.
So this is death by the numbers, I thought. Numbers so big it required two recounts, jumbo military transport planes to transport the bagged bodies back to America, all together on their last night on earth waiting in a line to kill themselves and their babies, those who would have mourned their death now dead amongst them.
There are too many mourners in America now. Mass murder is becoming our nation’s legacy.
“I think we have lost our soul, our moral conscience, the value and respect of human life,” says the Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina’s Catholic church in the city’s violence-torn Auburn Gresham neighborhood. “And we are all to blame.
“No place is out of bounds anymore; no race is exempt. Man’s inhumanity has now stooped to street level,” he says, referring to the fatal traffic stop in Memphis of 29-year old Tyre Nichols ,an African American man beaten to death by Black police officers.
Nichols, a new father, had been pulverized and savaged for not lying on the ground he was already on. Dead in three days, his face pummeled.
Now, Nichols’ incendiary traffic stop might finally greenlight national police reform legislation.
“The video of what happened to Tyre Nichols was traumatizing,” says Pfleger, an anti-gun violence priest who has seen his share of murdered children in coffins.
“But the video also symbolizes a broken system,” says Pfleger, whose adopted son was also murdered on the street.
“It can happen in church, a park, even yards away from the safety of your mother’s home calling your mother’s name like Nichols,” he says. “No place is out of bounds.
“The police officers in the Nichols video were acting in brutal gang mentality mode, obsessed with power, dehumanized. Not even looking at a person as a human being. The insanity of using a badge and a gun to do whatever you want and getting away with it.
“It all has to stop.” Pfleger says the video has traumatized people who have lost children to street violence.
“They told me they couldn’t sleep after watching it, hearing the eerie cries of Nichols’ mother, feeling the rebirth of pain for a child they were losing all over again, bringing back pain and tears, a scab off the womb.
“The immediate action taken in Memphis against the police, whether they be Black or white, was a blueprint for how police officers who do wrong should be addressed,” he says.
“We need federal police reform in this country. Not just state by state. We are one nation. There can’t be two sets of laws in this country.”
Amen.