Murders. Grief. Emptiness. The Valley’s sad crime realities affect us all | Opinion

A 16-year-old mother is shot dead and so is her 10-month-old baby. Execution style, in the head. Authorities believe gang violence is to blame.

Before that, a sister is accused of killing her younger sister and her baby. Jealousy is the cause, police say.

Fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, aunts, and uncles are left gasping — and grasping.

The rest of us turn away. We cannot read this news. If we do, we cannot understand the cruelty, and the lack of concern for the sanctity of life.

Yet, this is reality in the San Joaquin Valley.

Opinion

It was Goshen in Tulare County on Monday. Before that, it was a September shooting in Fresno in which an older sister and her boyfriend are accused of shooting an 18-year-old and her 3-week-old baby. Over the years human horrors have also occurred from Bakersfield to Modesto. So many Valley places have their own unthinkable true crimes, their unending tears, and uncontrolled sobbing.

This is where we live.

Ours is a Valley filled with gang violence. Domestic violence. Fueled by white-hot anger and often drugs. The results: Murders. Brokenness. Emptiness. Nothingness.

The victims and defendants may have different names, races, and circumstances that set them apart from most of us in one sense.

But they are human. As the poem says, no man is an island. We are all a part of the main.

Consider the Valley writ large: the divides between educated and uneducated; middle class and poverty; white, Black, Mexican, Hmong, Sikh, Indian, indigenous, Asian; straight, gay, trans; documented, undocumented.

We all call this home.

We all share this space. We all eat the abundant produce, see the winter snow-capped mountains, feel the warm spring sun, and bake in the summer heat.

With each life taken, our sense of community is devalued. We may look away because it is too painful, but we can’t escape the reality that our collective lives have been diminished. Our light is dimmer.

“But what can I do?” one asks. The problems seem overwhelming. Let’s face it: They are overwhelming.

Poverty. Drug abuse. Emotional abuse. Racial hatred. Unemployment. Too many feel the sensations of worthlessness, and the various forms of emotional, spiritual and communal isolation. Too many feel unloved, unnoticed, and discarded.

Outrageous crimes call for swift justice. But the path one takes toward heinous acts begins much earlier in life.

So many in the Valley suffer from a loss of hope. But, thankfully, not everyone in this Valley has lost that ability. If you are someone who cares, here is what you can do to make this Valley better:

Find just one person who needs encouragement, who needs a reason to keep going, and do your best to uplift that person. Do whatever comes naturally and for as long as it takes. If you can do just that one thing, that person can become the next one with hope, and they can pass it along to another hurting soul.

Fresno has more than 500,000 people. Clovis adds another 120,000. Are there 10,000 people in this place with hope for living, with caring, with dreams? If they invested themselves into broken family members, or friends, or work colleagues, or even strangers, that would double to 20,000. And so on.

It can happen in English. In Spanish. Hmong, Punjabi, Armenian, Chinese and Russian.

Heartbreak happens person by person. Rebuilding is one at a time, too.

This is for sure: Hope needs to happen in every neighborhood. Every. Single. Neighborhood.

Can we do this? Can we actually care about each other?

We have to. We’ve already witnessed the alternative.