It Can't Keep Happening.

The news from Saturday's mass shooting in Buffalo has slowed from its high a few days ago. The President and First Lady visited yesterday. Biden spoke eloquently of the victims’ lives and condemned the evil that ended them.

Last year, a shooting at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado shook me to me to my roots. I knew the store, I'd driven by it. I've eaten in a pleasant restaurant a few doors down. I know people who had worked in the store. And I know the city and community the store and it’s employees have served. The shooting hit me hard where I live.

I don’t know Buffalo. I know nothing about the Tops grocery store where the killer's victims were living their lives. But thanks to the news stations I know something about the men and women who died; who were murdered in Buffalo last Saturday. It strikes a wrong note to me to say or write that I feel I knew them. You can’t really know someone from a newscast. But, I now know enough to wish I had known them.

I wish I had known retired policeman and store guard Aaron Salter, at least well enough to smile and nod in passing, to acknowledge and thank him for his service to his community and neighbors; whom he died trying to protect.

I wish I had known Katherine Massey. Her photo alone exudes the energy and optimism inherent in her activism, the sort that excites and jolts those around her into action and hope.

I wish I had known Ruth Whitfield, the grandmother who stopped to buy her lunch after visiting her husband at a nearby nursing home, as she had every day. From looking at her picture and listening to her son talk about her, she seems the sort of woman it is a joy to hold a door for, or to take her grocery cart so she doesn’t have to return it to a corral. The sort of person who inspires you to be nice to others.

I wish I had known Roberta Drury, Margus Morrison, Andre Mackniel, Geraldine Talley, Celestine Chaney, Heyward Patterson, and Pearl Young. I read about them, look at their pictures, and they are much more than names on television. They are much, much more than victims of a hate-filled punk. They are human lives and stories, parents and children, siblings, and loved memories.

They were murdered for their skin color, for a belief that would be ridiculous if it hadn’t inspired monstrous deeds by corroded souls with delusions of superiority. The deranged “theory” that underlies these murders, its proponents and enablers are made more vile — more evil — by the nobility of the lives so cruelly taken.

At a press conference, Ruth Whitfield's son Garnell said, "This is not just some story to drive the news cycle. This is our mother, this is our lives ... Help us change this, this can't keep happening."

It mustn't keep happening and it is on all of us to bring it to an end. There are ten people in Buffalo who should be spending today with their families and friends. They join hundreds of souls who expect and demand long delayed justice. It’s now on us.