Pearl Young, 77, grandmother, mother, missionary of god, public-school teacher, who also ran the local food panty. Loved singing, dancing and her fami
Pearl Young, 77, grandmother, mother, missionary of god, public-school teacher, who also ran the local food panty. Loved singing, dancing and her family.
And all three who were injured, Zaire Goodman, 20, shot in the neck but fighting through it; Jennifer Warrington, 50; Christopher Braden, 55, both treated with injuries on a long road to recovery.
Individual lives of love, service and community that speaks to the bigger story of who we are as Americans, a great nation because we’re a good people. Jill and I bring you this message from deep in our nation’s soul. In America, evil will not win. I promise you. Hate will not prevail and white supremacy will not have the last word.
For the evil did come to Buffalo, and it’s come to all too many places, manifest in gunmen who massacred innocent people in the name of hateful and perverse ideology rooted in fear and racism. It’s taken so much; 10 lives cut short in a grocery store, three other wounded — three — three other wounded by a hate-filled individual who had driven 200 miles from Binghamton, in that range, to carry out a murderous, racist rampage that he would livestream, livestream to the world.
What happened here is simple and straightforward: terrorism. Terrorism. Domestic terrorism. Violence inflicted in the service of hate and the vicious thirst for power that defines one group of people being inherently inferior to any other group. A hate that, through the media and politics, the internet, has radicalized angry, alienated and lost individuals into falsely believing that they will be replaced. That’s the word. Replaced by the other. By people who don’t look like them.
I and all of you reject the lie. I call on all Americans to reject the lie, and I condemn those who spread the lie for power, political gain and for profit.
That’s what it is. We’ve now seen too many times the deadly and destructive violence this ideology unleashes. We heard the chants — “you will not replace us” — in Charlottesville, Virginia. I wasn’t going to run, as the senator knows, again for president. When I saw those people coming out of the woods of the fields in Virginia, in Charlottesville, carrying torches, shouting, you will not replace us, accompanied by white supremacists and carrying Nazi banners, that’s when I said, “No, no.” And I, honest to God, those who know me — Chuck, you know, I wasn’t going to run for certain. But I was going to be darned if I was going to let —, Anyway. I’ll get going.
www.nytimes.com