A Touching Mother’s day story with an untouching addeneum

Yes, a touching mother’s day story for you all. It was 56 years ago (yes over half a century ago ! ! ), and I was an intern at a big city hospital on rotation in their emergency room in a rough neighborhood. The ER entrance was half a block from an intersection with a bar on each corner. On a Saturday night, we knew better than to try to get some sleep before 2AM or until we’d put in 2 chest tubes (to drain blood from the lungs, which had been shot or stabbed). The bartenders were an intelligent lot — they had to be quick thinking to defuse situations, and we came to know them by name. So it was 3AM 51 years ago and Tyrone was trudging past on his way home, and I was just outside the ER getting some cool night air, things having quieted down.

“Happy Mother’s day, Tyrone” sayeth I

“Thanks Doc, but every day is Mother’s day with me”

“Why, Tyrone?”

“Because every day I get called a mother— “

Untouching Addendum

Well, it’s 56 years later and the terrible violence in the Black community continues unabated.  Nothing has changed from 1967.  Half the murdered people in this country are black with only 1 out of 7 being black.   My white neighbors drench themselves in holiness, displaying their virtue for all to see with signs on their lawns saying Black Lives Matter.  This neatly avoids facing the real problem — Black Lives Matter except to other Blacks. 

Addendum 14 May ’23 As if on command, today’s New York Times magazine has a story about a black woman killed by a white racist in Buffalo.  If every black killed by a nonBlack or a police officer even if black) were still alive, murdered blacks as a percentage of those murdered each year would still be close to 50%.   This sort of thing is so unhelpful, and probably harmful in taking the focus away from the all to real problem of excessive black deaths.

In fairness to my white neighbors, putting signs on their lawns is about all they can do.  Any change in the carnage must come from within the Black community itself, not from well-meaning whites.

Fortunately, there is a hopeful precedent — Mother’s Against Drunk Driving (MADD).   When they were founded in 1980, the USA population was 220 million and there were 28,000 drunk driving fatalities. In 2021 our population had grown by 50% to 330 million, with 13,000 drunk driving fatalities.  Had nothing changed we would have experienced 42,000 fatalities in 2021 instead of 13,000.  MADD simply made drinking and driving socially unacceptable.