DATELINE: Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 3 Muslim students shot dead by middle-aged shooter. This should be at top of cable news and top of every newspaper in the USA. Two of the dead were married just 1.5 months ago in joyful celebration. The other dead young person is a sister.”Each of the victims, Deah Barakat, his wife Yusor Mohammad, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, were just embarking on the first stage of their adult lives.”
The photo is from facebook page of one of the dead young adults, Yusor Abu-Salha. She wrote “All done and graduated from my beloved NC State University”
The young husband was in second year of dentistry school.
The shooter is in custody without bail. The pettiness of the seeming interaction bewteen all four and the grotesque solution the shooter chose is beyond words.
PROPER PRAYERS
As my grandmother Katerin
would pray over her beads
about heinous tragedy;
‘Three bright stars
will hang in the arms
of the trees forever
over that now holy ground.’
My father would then mutter
over his sharpening of knives,
‘Too many stars
over too many trees already
across the world.
Far less stars,
far more humanity.’
Let the humane we are called to, continue with us. May we all hand that strong bright red line of calling to those who come after us, as those before us have handed that strong boundary line to us for safekeeping, as they flew from the planet
—————
You can read the huffpo story about these three young lives … and also at Al Jazeera.
May their families and friends be held very close and comforted in every way for this loss of not just their young, but also our young also. The helping hands of these three young souls who reached out to help others, are exactly the kind of helps we would want in our entire world. All the more tragic that their voices and hands are silenced. Let all our good young who have been taken, and there are far far too many taken, may their good hearts and high hopes ever shine through our voices, our hands, in their names.