Shootings

On April 4, 1968, I was in Chicago on my spring break from college. Staying with friends on the Southside near the University. It was already dark as I walked that night from the train to m my friends' apartment. The streets buzzed with groups of people shouting, cars full of people driving around and around. "What's going on?" I asked someone. "Martin Luther King Jr has been assassinated," the man said.

At that moment, I felt the same stabbing pain in the chest and dizziness I had felt only a few years before, on hearing of the Kennedy assassination. Someone told me that news on November 22, 1963 in an elevator and I almost fainted then, too.

Thankfully assassinations are still not commonplace; the word itself feels alien in my mouth. One dictionary definition reads, "to murder (a prominent person) by surprise attack, as for political reasons." JFK, Martin, Robert. Those of us who lived through these horrible shootings remember exactly where we were when we heard the news.

But are assassinations as rare as we think? We don't call drive-by shootings assassinations. We tally our homicides here in Oakland and compare them to the tallies in comparable large cities. The recent shooting of Representative Giffords reminded us how easy it is to get a gun and of the travesty of the "background check." My own high school students have scoffed at the idea. "Anyone can get a gun any time," they said. In fact, some schools have metal detectors at the front door and now we have body scans to detect plastic guns or explosives at airports. We don't use the word assassination for these murders - the aspects of prominence and politics, are missing. But in a way homicides on our streets are political, and shouldn't we view each human life as "prominently" valuable? Street shootings and violent crimes link to poverty and social injustice, which are political. Altars of flowers and teddy bears on street corners testify to the prominence of another young person gunned down.

When I first started teaching high school drama, I was shocked to learn of the frequency of gun violence in students' lives. We were playing a warm up exercise I called "the community game," in which we stepped into the center of our circle to identify common ground. Towards the end of the warm up I asked, "Step to the center if you've ever lost a friend or relative through gun violence," ALL OF US stepped into the circle. Slowly over the years I became accustomed to my students' need to talk about neighborhood violence, to write skits about it, to mourn.

Martin Luther King Jr, who exemplified peace making and was aware of the threats against his life, showed us the way we should live. I am grateful he has his own holiday for us to reflect on his dream and his reality. May both come to pass.