Some Things Should Never Make Sense

I have a friend on Facebook that I went to high school with who recently lost someone close to her to violence in the metro area. She’s been really upset and trying to come to grips with it. She’s not the only one suffering from the same circumstances but I have been watching her go through the process of trying to accept what happened. Wednesday she posted a message saying she was trying to make sense of his murder and why he’s gone. I am not that good at saying things to people in grief. I’m sure what I wanted to tell her may have been misunderstood. My advice to her and everyone else was going to be not to try to make sense of it because it shouldn’t make sense. In my mind some things don’t make any sense and admitting that is the only way to change it.

We have the issue whenever a murder or act of violence on the street happens that we have to come up with some reasonable explanation of why these things keep taking place. I think that’s why the violent culture became so entrenched in the community. There was just too much investment and energy needed to admit that kind of failure and we didn’t have enough leaders willing to put in the work to change course. I was in my teens when it really got bad. I have many friends that aren’t here anymore and it still bothers me. Back then it was usually just the drug dealers or someone associated with them who got killed so when a shooting happened we just charged it to the game. After all these years of losing young men I’m thinking that if maybe we treated the first wave of killings like it was the plague here to destroy us all we may not be in the predicament we are now. Just maybe there would be many more fathers and sons here. Maybe we would have found a way to work around the obstacles that put us in the situation to be around this violence instead of finding as many reasons to validate it and not stopping it. I don’t know for sure if things would be different now but I wish we would have tried that approach.

The need for things to make sense no matter how wrong is not just limited to the inner city. We see it everyday all over the world. There are people who ignore obvious things right in front of their faces because they have to validate the beliefs in their head. You can’t spend years telling yourself that something is happening for a particular reason and then just let that go. The human brain is too stubborn for that. If you think black on black crime is caused because of slavery when they split up the families of because the government let drugs flow into the community then you’ll never get to the point mentally that you need to be to fix it. I happen to think that the reasons people give are true but I never let that dominate my mind where I find validation in any violence. At the end of the day it’s genocide. That’s the bottom line and we all have to see it that way if we want to stop it.

The black on black violence in America is just one example of what I’m talking about. People all over have the same problem. We see it everyday in many different areas. I think the violence will end and some of the problems around the world will change when more and more people can look at something and say to themselves that this situation makes absolutely no sense at all and try to change it instead of trying to validate why things are the way they are. We can’t bring our family and friends back but we can stop people from joining them by just admitting that there is no excuse for any of this foolishness. We have to get to the point where murders hurts all so bad we can’t focus on anything but stopping them.