Dear Friends,
Late at night I sometimes feel like Marty and I are Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in the flashback scenes of Casablanca, holding each other in Paris while the German invasion approaches, listening together as the explosions come closer and closer. Unlike that other couple in love, however, we haven’t much worried about the gunfire outside, knowing that most of it involves drug dealings that have nothing to do with us. Honestly, until lately our biggest problem with hearing shootings has been getting Marty back to sleep once they wake her up.
Over the past few weeks, however, our situation in Walnut Hills has changed in a significant way. Suddenly it seems there’s a full scale war going on in this neighborhood, and we and our neighbors here are in a new kind of danger.
Last Monday, on their way back to college after helping out at our weekly dinner party, our friends Jenny and Alyssa stopped at an intersection and noticed a group of guys milling around in the early evening, less than a block from our church. A moment later, guns started firing on both sides of them and, before they could pull away, four bullets entered their car. They weren’t hurt, but they could have been killed.
The next night, a few blocks away, four men carrying automatic weapons walked by our friend Ella as she was sitting on her front steps watching her grandchildren play. As she hustled the kids inside, those men shot up her block.
Two days later, back on our church’s corner, an older kid I know named Wayne took a bullet in the foot just after midnight. When I asked him about it yesterday he brushed me off, but I know he’s scared, and well he should be. You see, unlike our college girls or Miss Ella, Wayne knows exactly what’s going on around here. He’s part of it.
The bottom line is that six months ago a local guy named Taz was murdered in a bar. There were plenty of witnesses, but none of them would testify against the killer. Evidently, as friends of the victim, they wanted him to be released so they could take care of him in their own way. Of course, the killer has friends, too. Unfortunately, nobody on either side seems to be able to shoot straight. Or willing to hold their fire until after the rest of us are safely tucked in.
In Casablanca, Bogie was always cool under fire, but I’m guessing that was because he didn’t have children. Here in Walnut Hills Marty and I are genuinely afraid, for our neighbors, for the folks in our little community, and especially for our precious Miranda and Roman. And, of course, we are doing all we can to keep them safe in the midst of this trouble.
Then again, we are not doing the one thing that would keep them safest of all right now: We are not putting them out of harm’s way. We are not moving. On the contrary, every day we are quite intentionally rooting ourselves more deeply in this neighborhood, in spite of our not infrequent inclinations to cut and run.
Miss Ella has no choice in the matter. She must live here, or someplace like here. Likewise with Wayne, though he could at least choose to be part of the solution from now on, instead of part of the problem. But Marty and I, Ric and Karen, Donna and Jeff, we all could go if we chose to, which is probably the most important thing that sets us apart in this neighborhood, for better and for worse. We’re educated and connected in ways that mean we can never really be poor, no matter how little we may make or live on. Poverty, after all, is not so much the absence of money as it is the absence of choices.
Right now, though, it is those choices that keep Marty and I up at night, even more than the gunfire. We wonder what it means to say we love our neighbors if we aren’t willing to stay with them here. We wonder what it means to say we love our children if we aren’t willing to go. We wonder what it means to say we love God if we still can’t always tell the difference between God’s will and our own desires and insecurities.
And, like Bogart and Bergman, we hope and pray for the liberation of Paris…and Walnut Hills.
Sincerely,
Bart