Funeral

Saturday morning I got up at 7:30 to get to a funeral for 9am. It was for a friend's older brother, Timothy Willie Russell. He was 32 and a father of 2. Later that morning another funeral was being held for their cousin who was killed at the same time. They were shot to death in a car in the Lower 9th Ward neighborhood of Holy Cross about 10 days ago, late at night during a tremendous thunderstorm.
This was the first time that someone close enough to me to feel had been affected by a murder. And I did feel it. I was like a water faucet during the funeral, gushing tears on and off.
It was also the first time that I'd attended a funeral with such a packed house, or for such a young person, and I'd never seen young Black men in too-big pants crying and holding their loved ones like I saw at this funeral.
But this scene is all-too common in this city. Young Black men in particular are killed regularly. Since the start of the year, the police have killed 3. And then there are the shootings that aren't done by the police.
What was interesting to me was the fact that nothing changed about my feelings for the city. I just thought that this has to stop, and I should probably do something. It's a complex problem because certainly the lack of jobs that will support a family plays a part in this, just as, I suspect, all the untreated post-traumatic stress related to Katrina does, too. On top of that, there are plenty of guns around.
Is this happening in other cities around the country? Are the young being culled, leaving just an older generation?