Love pours out

It’s been a sad week, the news tragic.  I hardly know what to say or where to start.

Cable Network News, CNN, I have often heard referred to as Constantly Negative News.  And I find that true to be of most news stations, not just CNN, and it’s simply because we, the viewers, are mostly interested in what went wrong, or what’s going wrong.  So they publish that.  As a result I rarely watch the news.

That means I hear about the news from those around me.  My heart sank when I heard about what happened in Toronto – there was a block party, a disagreement, and death.  Two people dead with twenty-three wounded.  It came to my attention because it happened in a predominantly Jamaican area and at the time was said to be a Jamaican gang war.

It was a bad day to be a Jamaican but a worse day to be shot.  I had a slew of questions flying through my brain and a long discussion with Paul about why, and when, immigrants bring their wars from their homeland to a country that has been gracious enough to accept them in.

Then days later the shooting happened in Aurora, Colorado at the premier of the new Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises.  Twelve people dead, fifty-eight injured and some still in critical condition.  One woman who died in Colorado was at another shooting rampage at the Eaton Center in Toronto months earlier.  It had affected her so badly at the time that she decided, according to her mother, that she had to live her life to the fullest.  I found myself feeling so devastated watching the report and I realized I really could not imagine how the victims involved, or their families, must feel.

Now it doesn’t feel like it makes a difference whether you are an immigrant or just a madman, it seems a dark time just to be a human.  Then I check my Facebook page and my Twitter feed and the love pours out.  I see people on the news who, we are told, don’t know each other hugging and giving support to others at vigils.  I see the light that we have within us shined even brighter and I know that we can overcome the constantly negative news that we see around us.

But it takes each and every one of us, each and every day, in our little corners of the world.

At the same time, please join me – direct your love and prayers to the victims and families in these tragedies.