Reflections on Newtown

As I sat in church on Sunday, my mind wandered as it often does there, as church for me is a place that offers an opportunity for reflection both back and forward. This past Sunday was no different as I thought about the minister’s prayer of comfort and guidance in response to the shooting last week in a town in Connecticut, where it was not suppose to happen. My thoughts this past Sunday was about a student who attended Medgar Evers College.

Her name is not important. She was a mother who took her sick child to the hospital . While there, as her daughter was waiting to be seen by the doctor, she left the child with its father and stepped outside where she was senselessly shot to death. Her name is not important here, but to her daughter, her family and to her classmates and members of the Medgar Evers College family, she was a valued and loving human being.

This mom will be grieved by family, friends and the community which loved her. She will not be mourned by a governor, president or the world. She will only be mourned by the people close to her because she was a black woman who lived in a community where these things are suppose to happen!

I remain deeply disturbed by the continuing descriptions of the ‘horrific loss of life” in communities where these things are not suppose to happen. No child should be senselessly torn from its parents and family by acts of violence that have come to characterize to many of our urban communities. And no child should have to suffer the loss of a parent whose life has been snuffed out by an act of violence.

I am tired America, of grieving families, neighbors and communities who say that it is not supposed to happen here. It should not happen anywhere.

Dr. William Pollard is the President of Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York