We are tired.
We’re tired of gunfire that makes the streets feel like some lawless stretch of Somalia where warlords rule without fear.
We’re tired of the random violence that turns pickup basketball games into bull runs that send mothers and daughters scrambling for their lives.
We’re tired of the punks who, besides not being able to shoot straight, believe they have the right to avenge the tiniest of slights with weapons designed to take out an infantry.
We’re tired of going to funerals for little girls and boys.
“This boy should be on the conscience of all of us,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton as he eulogized a 4-year-old shooting victim last night in a crowded Harlem church.
Little Lloyd Morgan Jr. was shot and killed in a Bronx park July 22 after a wild gun battle broke out at a basketball tournament.
An angry Sharpton talked about the heartbroken mother, Shianne Norman, who shared fond memories of the little boy she called “Chris” who loved to eat pancakes for breakfast and doted on his dad.
“She was very gracious to us,” Sharpton told mourners at the Mount Neboh Baptist Church on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. “She should have gotten up from here and cussed y’all out.”
That’s because, he said, we have learned to adapt to the violence that chokes the life out of our communities.
But we’re tired now.
We’re tired of toothless laws that make it as easy to buy guns as it is to get Juicy Fruit from a vending machine.
We’re tired of do-nothing parents who know their children carry guns and run with gangs because they spend the drug money these punks bring home every night.
And we’re tired of all the excuses, the economy, budget cuts, a lack of programs for young people.’
“Just because they bring the guns in here,” Sharpton said, “you don’t have to be dumb enough to pick them up and shoot each other.”
Sharpton said he didn’t want to speak at the funeral because he knew no words to comfort the family.
He tried his best with with a passage from the Book of Matthew, which quotes Jesus discussing the value of a child.
“Who so shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”
Now, that sounds like a plan.