It is impossible to teach without the courage to love, with the courage to try a thousand times before giving up. In short, it is impossible to teach without a forged, invented, and well-thought-out capacity to love.
—Paulo Freire
The Mothers’ Walk for Peace, 13th annual, 3.6 miles, about a 70-80 minute walk, at a good clip, held this last Sunday morning in the sun and cool air, drew maybe not a record number of participants, nor a record number of Quakers, but the crowd was sizable. It was also loud, cheery, rambunctious, and filled with grief. A strange combination: grief and joy. The grief of losing loved ones thru youth violence, and the joy of being with others who’ve similarly suffered.
I was deeply touched when hearing Tanya David, the mother of a young girl speaking to the crowd at the end of the walk. She said, Unlike many of you, none of my children have died because of street violence. But my daughter, Kyle, was shot thru the spine and lost 97% of it and her spinal function. The doctors say she will be paralyzed form the waist down for life, but I don’t believe that. Then her daughter spoke, a lively, beautiful, articulate girl, speaking from her wheel chair about all of us joining together to stop the violence, in part by offering forgiveness to perpetrators.
Kyle David: “Forgiveness is the way”
The muses brought me to the side of the stage for this talk, I’d not anticipated who would be speaking or how much I needed to photograph them. Using my wide-angle lens and not having the best position—I was reluctant to climb on the stage—I’m not sure I made anything significant. But I felt the emotion, the marriage of anger, grief, and energy from the stupid and preventable violence happening daily on the streets and in the parks of Dorchester and Roxbury and other stricken regions of our cities.
