Some Thoughts

There are some instances where words can describe nothing. All the same, I'll try.
At St. Anna's Episcopal Church in New Orleans, there is a list of all the murder victims in New Orleans. Which sounds, when I put it here, almost ordinary. Right? We see that kind of thing in the newspaper, or on the news. People die. Crime exists. It's normal.
I can't really explain why that list impacted me so much. Just-- try to get a picture in your head.
There's a tall piece of what seems to be white cardboard, stretching up the wall of an oldish church. The list is handwritten in black ink: date, name, age, cause of death. The causes vary: beaten, abused, strangled, shot... but mostly shot.
To be honest, my first thought when I saw the list was, 'from what we were told, I figured there would be more names.' I thought that-- and felt bad for doing so-- and then I noticed something toward the top of the wall. In bold black letters was written 2014.
There must have been at least 60 names there, people killed in the last six months alone. I remember just standing there, staring at the names. I tried to say each one in my head, as if saying their names might accomplish anything at all. I noticed that four of them died two days ago. My brother's birthday, incidentally.
Normally when I write, there's this vague little voice at the back of my mind that is essentially responsible for the quality of my work. You could call it self-doubt. It tells me to do better, think harder, it judges the quality and the voice. Only as I write this now, I have shut that voice away. It just doesn't matter. Sitting here, I can't wrap my mind around the fact that while I was living through my last few months of high school, choosing a college and studying for AP tests, people were dying.
And I knew. I knew that there was crime, I knew about income disparity, about racism. But I thought about it only in passing. Crime didn't touch my life, so I didn't care, and thus the unsolvable problem goes unsolved.
I didn't cry, standing there in the humid evening air. Not because I didn't feel anything, but because I didn't understand. What right do I have to cry over a name when I know nothing about the life behind it? The name is not the person, after all. All I really learned about those lives were their length. On just the 2014 list, it spanned from an unborn baby to a fifty-two-year-old man.
When we got back on the bus, Julie Brown said something that very distinctly stuck in my mind. She asked us to think about the race of most of the people who had been murdered. She also asked: if that many white people were killed, wouldn't, honestly, something more have been done?
I don't really have a conclusion here. I just want you to understand how little we know about the world around us. Our lives seem so important-- lives, and comfort, and wealth. But in reality, there is work to be done on this planet. So if you have a chance to do that work, then do it. And if you don't have a chance, make one.

I don't mean to sound all negative. This trip has been great so far, and I like the work. It's just that I feel really uncomfortable with how privileged I am.

-Lian Simmer