Yet, somehow, the idyllic pictures I once loved have been replaced with horrific images of children dodging bullets and makeshift memorials that keep flashing over and over in my mind.
Sadly, I’m not a newcomer to the devastation caused by gun violence. I was just 13 years old in 1978 when a classmate at Murchison Junior High in Austin, Texas came to school with a rifle and killed a beloved English teacher. Fast-forward to the summer of 1992 in Chicago, and I would witness another tragedy. While looking out the window of the bus I was riding to work, I saw a young man who had just been shot lying on a street corner.
And, then, there was the day in September 2012 when I received a text from my daughter who had just begun her freshman year of high school.
“Mommy, he was in my Spanish class.”
She was speaking of Dajae Coleman, a 14-year-old Evanston Township High School student who had been shot and killed over the weekend in a case of mistaken identity.