His Point of View

I don’t know how many of my readers follow me on twitter but if you do, perhaps you read a tweet I sent out a couple weeks ago about hearing a song mentioning a person (or people) you know.  The long and short of it is that I happen to have grown up in a neighborhood with a few people who have found some success in the music industry.   A couple of weeks ago I heard a song by one of these individuals which mentioned the fact that one of my closest childhood friends was murdered.   I had to play the song about 10-15 times to make sure I was hearing the lyrics correctly.  I made a few phone calls and my family could not confirm it, nor could the only other person I grew up with in the neighborhood that I still have contact with.  So I sort of dismissed it as perhaps it was another person the musician knew with the same name.  The band that made the song in question came to DC this past weekend and I got to spend a few moments catching up with the band member that I knew growing up and sadly he confirmed that he was talking about my friend.

The fact that this young man lost his life in such a senseless manner is bad enough, but I could not help but to think of his remaining family that has been hit so very hard by death.  My deceased friend, lost one of his older brothers when we were very young and his mother to cancer while we were in middle or high school.  I could not help to think of the pain his father and remaining brother  must have experienced.

The second tragedy is that this is the fourth young man from the single block that makes up the neighborhood that I grew up in that is immortalized in the lyrics of a song, who is now dead and no longer here to hear the songs written about him.

The third tragedy related to this issue is the fact that I am the only young man from my neighborhood within a 5 year age range that is alive, currently not incarcerated, and has never gotten caught up in gangs or drugs as far as I know…(there is 1 other young man who I really didn’t know growing up from our neighborhood, and I have no idea of his status over the last 11+ years since I left East Point, GA).  My neighborhood was squarely upper middle class, suburban (continue reading…)