Bittersweet

From January to April of this year, 134 homicides were recorded in the city of Chicago, which means that on average, a little more than one person's life was taken violently every single day for four solid months. For a while, we were hearing about multiple Chicago Public schoolchildren dying over weekends and how it was affecting the surviving children in the school system. I wouldn't imagine that that is good for morale. One very young boy was killed watching TV; as he sat on his couch probably watching cartoons, a stray bullet came through the window of his home and struck him in the chest.

As the congregation in church this morning sang patriotic songs in honor of Independence Day, I began to think about this America, the one so many fight for everyday, the place that people risk their lives to sneak over borders to come to. There are so many men and women who have decided that the freedom of not only their own family and friends, but that of people they don't even know, is worth risking their own lives for, those who are so selfless that a sacrifice of their own lives is wholly made.

And then we turn around and kill each other.

Why worry about terrorists doing it when we are doing it ourselves? Is this why our military exists - to ensure the liberty of people who are so ungrateful and selfish that they take the lives of others in their own backyards freely and without remorse?

Here I sit, tucked away in the pillow of Naperville, Illinois, a good hour away from the innards of the great city of Chicago. Sure, we have our problems: some friends of ours got their car keyed by some girls who didn't like their daughter, a couple of times teenage girls were followed around by deviants in their cars, that sort of thing. Over the years there have even been a few tragic instances of mothers killing their own children. In no way do I make light of these things, they are all awful, some worse than others, but all an invasion of the rights of others and damaging to the very fabric of society.

But how does one live under the constant threat of errant bullets, of people so angry that they are ready to explode in violence at the drop of a hat? And how is it that fighting and fighting and dying and dying result in a place that, while its people’s freedom is ensured, suffers such a breakdown and decay of values? Do we not appreciate what we have been given?

Apparently not.