COMMENTARY
Rod Watson: Wondering about cycle of violence
Javon R. Jackson’s mother came here to watch her successful student graduate from college and, instead, ended up planning his funeral on Mother’s Day.
Anyone who hasn’t been through it can only imagine the heartache she felt, particularly when cleaning out his room and finding the Mother’s Day card he never got to hand her.
You can only wonder how she manages to go on.
But it’s not only Jackson’s mother I wonder about today. I wonder about a lot of things, starting with the mother of whoever shot him.
I wonder if she got a card from the killer Sunday—after he had ruined that day forever for another mother—or if she failed him too long ago for such a gesture.
I wonder if she even knows her son well enough to know that he is a killer, that he carries a gun, or that he hangs around with thugs who do.
I wonder what she was doing while he was learning that the way to settle a beef is with a bullet.
But mothers shouldn’t have to raise their sons alone. After all, they didn’t create them alone.
I wonder about the shooter’s dad, too, and what he expects on Father’s Day.
I wonder who was the kid’s male role model when he learned that the way to look strong is to shoot the unarmed.
I wonder who taught him that the way to be a man is to kill someone who might have been guilty of nothing more than defending a woman.
Given the intraracial nature of most murders, odds are that the shooter is black. I wonder who told him that the way to build up the African-American community is by gunning down its future.
I wonder if he knows that blacks are grossly underrepresented in engineering, the field in which Jackson earned his bachelor’s degree and planned to pursue his master’s. The graduate would have added to the number. Instead, there will be one fewer.
I wonder if the shooter’s parents heard about Jackson’s parents, both of whom cried as they cleaned out his room and found the card and the diploma he never got to hang on a wall.
And I wonder if they realize how colossally they failed at the only job that really matters—and I wonder how much they care.
But maybe his parents are dead. Or maybe they simply didn’t have the parenting skills to cope with the pull of the streets.
So I wonder about the village, too. You remember the village, as in “It takes a village to raise a child.”
At a monthly University Heights Collaborative meeting two nights after the shooting and only a few blocks away, some people talked about a greater police presence during special events such as graduation weekend. That makes sense, as does stricter sentencing of repeat predators.
But a Lisbon Avenue resident also talked about “the village” without ever using the term. He warned that we can’t solve crime without doing something about the East Side’s drugs, poverty and joblessness—the effects of which can’t be contained by lines on a map.
He’s right. There are reasons for the violence—though there is no excuse. I don’t really care about the person who shot Javon Jackson, except that he be caught.
But I do care about the 6-year-old who’s growing up in the same neighborhood the shooter grew up in.
I wonder whose footsteps he will follow in: the shooter’s or Jackson’s.
And I wonder what we—and his parents— are doing to help him make that choice.
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