To whom it may still concern

I believe in communities that rally after tragedy. In parents who choose love despite their pain. In teachers who shelter their students during active shooter drills and then go home and weep alone. I believe in the tired social worker, the determined youth counsellor, the neighbour who calls 911 because she can’t ignore the screams next door anymore.

I write this not as a heart in mourning, but a conscience under siege. Being in a nation where the noise of sirens has become a lullaby, and the scent of gunpowder no longer startles but settles like dust, I find myself asking, again and again: Is America still concerned?

Because if we are truly concerned, how can we live with the silence that follows five gunshots in a mall in Waterbury, Connecticut?

On May 28, inside the Brass Mill Centre, a place that should echo with laughter, music, teenage flirtations and the occasional hum of a food court, five people were injured in a burst of gunfire. The shooter, 19-year-old Tajuan Washington, reportedly had a personal conflict that spiraled into something else entirely. Not a school shooting. Not terrorism. Just another “incident,” another “dispute” that turned five lives into statistics. The mayor called it “an awful thing that makes people feel unsafe,” but what language is left for a country where malls, movie theatres, parades, schools, and churches can all become crime scenes before sundown?

America cannot say it didn’t see it coming. In fact, it has grown so accustomed to seeing it that it barely reacts anymore. Local news reported that the mayor is requesting $2 million in violence prevention funding. That’s a drop in the ocean when you consider what has been taken, not just lives and blood, but innocence, safety, and trust.

But perhaps no story from this past week haunts me more than the one from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. In that quiet suburban cul-de-sac, Rodney Shippy, 58, killed his 10-year-old son Logan and his 20-year-old daughter Alyssa before turning the gun on himself. He also killed the family dog. All of them found together, inside the home where they once celebrated birthdays, watched movies, maybe even said bedtime prayers.

I can’t stop picturing Alyssa, twenty years old, with a whole life ahead and little Logan, just a boy. I wonder if he still had his baby teeth. I wonder if he was asleep when it happened. I wonder if he called out for help. But no one came. Because there was no one left. His mother and grandmother had both taken their own lives months earlier. This wasn’t a singular tragedy; it was a collapse. A lineage swallowed by despair.

What happens when trauma becomes hereditary? When sadness metastasizes like an ailment passed from a parent to a child? Oklahoma has been wrestling with the consequences of untreated mental illness and rising domestic violence for years. In 2023, domestic violence-related homicides hit a record high in the state. How many families need to vanish before mental health is treated like the emergency it is?

Meanwhile, in Greenville, Mississippi, an 18-year-old football player named Alex Foster, newly recruited to Baylor University, was found shot to death in his car. There were no suspects at the time of reporting. No answers. Just a mother somewhere wondering why her son, her baby, didn’t come home. Just a city imposing a curfew as if curfews could protect against the rot inside the bones of a country that seems to raise boys for burial instead of brilliance.

They called Alex a rising star. I’m tired of hearing that phrase. So many of America’s brightest stars are being extinguished before they can shine fully; they are shot down in streets, cars and at homes before we even know what they could’ve become. Scientists. Artists. Fathers. Dreamers. Gone.

And then there is Washington, D.C., where four members of the so-called “Get Back Gang” have now pleaded guilty to multiple murders and drive-by shootings. These were not men in suits playing power games in boardrooms. These were young men, caught in cycles of retaliation, chaos, and desperation. Southeast D.C. has long been marked by a pattern of violence that doesn’t make the national headlines unless there’s an election nearby. These kids did not wake up one day and decide to kill. They grew up in places where the state failed to protect, to educate, to nurture. The gang was their safety net. Their family. Their reckoning.

I’m tired of America’s willful amnesia. It acts shocked when these stories break, then move on with the next TikTok trend or scandal. But these are not aberrations. They are the symptoms of a system in need of redemption.

In New York City, violence simmers not just in gunfire but in everyday commutes. Assaults in the subway are up 19 per cent in the last five months, with police officers and Metropolitan Transportation Authority workers increasingly becoming the targets. That’s not just crime; it’s a measure of how fractured the social contract has become. You cannot pack hundreds of thousands of people into a city, strip away mental health resources, housing, employment, and expect peace to bloom out of chaos.

We’re told, however, that the national murder rate is dropping. The FBI reported a nearly 12 per cent decline in homicides in 2023, and early 2025 projections are even more optimistic. On paper, things are getting better. But paper doesn’t hold candles at vigils. Paper doesn’t explain why millions of Americans still feel unsafe in schools, churches, homes, and trains.

We live in a country of paradoxes. Fewer murders, but more mass shootings. Lower crime rates, but higher fear. The dissonance between statistics and lived experience is growing, and it is fertile ground for apathy and disillusionment.

And now, as the trial for Bryan Kohberger (accused of murdering four University of Idaho students in 2022) looms, we are forced once again to confront the brutality of senseless loss. Four lives ended. Four families grieving. The prosecution will present a knife purchase, a criminology essay, a chilling digital trail. And yet, even this story, which once gripped the nation, now competes for attention with the next tragedy on the horizon.

Even the justice system is overwhelmed. In D.C., a man named Darrell Moore, once granted early release from a life sentence, was convicted of another murder just eight months later. He was given a second chance, and someone else paid for it with their life. What do we do with that kind of pain? How does a country where mercy and accountability seem unevenly applied ensure balance?

This is not a letter of answers. It is a letter of aching questions. It is a howl in the dark. A lament for a country numbed by repetition. A prayer for the souls lost in violence and for the ones still clinging to life in its shadow.

I fear Americans and other residents are adjusting their expectations downward to the extent that they now teach their children not how to live, but how to survive and they raise them not to dream, but to duck.

My final take: But I still believe. I believe in communities that rally after tragedy. In parents who choose love despite their pain. In teachers who shelter their students during active shooter drills and then go home and weep alone. I believe in the tired social worker, the determined youth counsellor, the neighbour who calls 911 because she can’t ignore the screams next door anymore.

And I believe in the power of remembering. Of refusing to let these names, these places, these heartbreaks fade into forgettable blur. Because the moment we stop caring is the moment we become complicit.

So, to whoever still reads this, to whoever still feels, please do not look away.