Shell Shocked in The Black Community

It seems to me as though the black community is experiencing a mental illness known as Shell Shock or in more modern terms known a "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder"(PTSD). What is even more disturbing about this silent epidemic is that most of it's victims in the black community have never even experienced military combat or been in a war zone.

Shell Shock in the black community is a by product of the black on black crime being committed in too high numbers in our black communities, now at a rate of almost one murder per day in St. Louis. the direct and indirect affects of black on black crime has basically traumatized our communities and has made us a people of confusion not knowing why, a poeple of many questions not knowing even what to ask.

Diagnosis "shell shock".

The first and most important step, of if I may "cure" for our illness of shell shock is to stop killing each other. There are many other and more difficult steps that also need to be taken, but the first and to me the easiest step is to stop the black on black violence.

I sat at the bus stop last summer and listened to two older school mates share with each other what they were up to. The lady shared with her old school mate that she was on her way to her sons wake. This was the third son that this lady had lost to murder. She had four, her old school mate told me after she left.

The thing that disturbed me the most about this lady was not that she was going to see and say good-bye to her son in a casket but the calm and distant demeanor in which she expressed it to her old school mate.