Are we willing to pass violence along to future generations?

'We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”

- Tom Stoppard, 'Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead”

Dear brothers and sisters,

It appears that death is a way of life in our neighborhood, our community and in our homes. They tell us to 'get over it” but I can't get over it, I must cry to get through it, thinking of the mothers who have lost their children from senseless murders.

How many of the people you know have been murdered?

As Stacy Peralta says in her documentary, Crips and Bloods: Made in America: 'We cannot continue to see generation after generation of children reared in anger becoming yet another generation of killers.”

Our youth need the freedom that comes with education. Knowledge breaks the chains that bind us.

What does the future hold for those who have no entrance to our rapidly changing economy?

How can we provide education and employment opportunities to reduce violence and bring stability to our neighborhoods?

Have we failed at the most elementary level task, to be a good citizen and decent human?

Has violence become the norm for our community? Something we are willing to pass along to the generations that will follow long after we are gone from this place?

I understand, the jobs have gone away and that your fundamental right was taken away years ago.

I understand that our time in the early part of our history handicapped us beyond our own control. Your forefathers and mothers still rose up out of those ashes.

Corporations left, leaving large spaces of land abandoned and desolate. Your ancestors worked in those factories, toiling as others did. Taking care of their families working every day to secure a home and some prosperity.

Your children have been caught up in a struggle where death may be the only escape.

Turf wars, gun culture, and stringent rules of loyalty. But loyalty to whom? Where did the erosion of our identity come from?

That erosion perpetuates black self-hatred and the disappearance of the black father in our homes.

Would the society deal differently with or have a solutions to these problems if it were affluent white teenagers who were killing one another? We must not linger here for the answer.

We participate in our own extinction.

How can we continue to be our own oppressors, or haven't we figured that out yet?

Our plight has been twisted in press stories that display us as animals who stand by as bullets rip into the torso of another human simply for entering into marked off territory.

We are depicted as silent onlookers of mass incarceration and deaths.

Do you not know of Watts? Rodney King? Can we continue to leave our story to be told by others?

Brothers and sisters, do not continue to take leave of yourself.

For when you lend a voice to yourself, your children, your community, your neighborhood, and the nation in which you live. You will better understand what came before you and what may lie in front of the generations to come.

Remember, the measure of a person is not by his own journey. It is the way he or she can see themselves through the journey of others.

For to know thy self, we can be truthful to others.

Help our children by being present in their lives.

' Betty S. Daniels, of Cedar Rapids, is a writer and mother. Comments: