A 16-year-old mother is shot dead on Monday and so is her 10-month-old baby. Execution-style, in the head. Authorities believe gang violence is to blame.
Before that, a woman is accused of killing her younger sister and her baby. Jealousy is the cause, police say.
Fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, aunts and uncles are left gasping — and grasping.
The rest of us turn away. We may not be able to read the news. If we do, we can’t understand the cruelty or the lack of concern for the sanctity of life.
Yet this is reality in the San Joaquin Valley.
It was Goshen in Tulare County. Before that, it was a September shooting in Fresno in which woman and her boyfriend are accused of shooting her 18-year-old sister and her 3-week-old baby. Over the years human horrors have also occurred from Bakersfield to Modesto. So many Valley places have their own unthinkable true crimes, their unending tears and uncontrolled sobbing.
This is where we live.
Ours is a Valley scarred by gang violence. Domestic violence. Fueled by white-hot anger and often drugs. The results: Murders. Brokenness. Emptiness. Nothingness.
The victims and defendants may have different names, races and circumstances that set them apart from most of us in one sense or another.
But they are human. As the poet wrote, no man is an island. We are all a part of the main.
Consider the Valley writ large: the divides between educated and uneducated; middle class and poverty; white, Black, Mexican, Hmong, Sikh, Indian, Indigenous, Asian; straight, gay, trans; documented, undocumented.
We all call this home.
We all share this space. We all eat the abundant produce, see the winter-snow-capped mountains, feel the warm spring sun and bake in the summer heat.
With each life taken, our sense of community is devalued. We may look away because it is too painful, but we can’t escape the reality that our collective lives have been diminished. Our light is dimmer.
“But what can I do?” one asks. The problems seem overwhelming. Let’s face it: They are overwhelming.
Poverty. Drug abuse. Emotional abuse. Racial hatred. Unemployment. Too many feel the sensation of worthlessness and various forms of emotional, spiritual and communal isolation. Too many feel unloved, unnoticed and discarded.
Outrageous crimes call for swift justice. But the path one takes toward heinous acts begins much earlier in life.
So many in the Valley suffer from a loss of hope. But, thankfully, not everyone in this Valley has lost the ability to hope. If you are someone who cares, here is what you can do to make this Valley better:
Find just one person who needs encouragement, who needs a reason to keep going, do your best to lift up that person. Do whatever comes naturally and for as long as it takes. If you can do just one thing, that person can become the next one with hope and can pass it along to another hurting soul.
Fresno has more than 500,000 people. Clovis adds another 120,000. Are there 10,000 people in this place with hope for living, with caring, with dreams? If they invested themselves in broken family members, or friends, or colleagues, or even strangers, that would double to 20,000. And so on.
It can happen in English. In Spanish. Hmong, Punjabi, Armenian, Chinese and Russian.
Heartbreak happens person by person. Rebuilding is one at a time, too.
This is for sure: Hope needs to happen in every neighborhood. Every. Single. Neighborhood.
Can we do this? Can we actually care about each other?
We have to. We’ve already witnessed the alternative.
