Seems like every summer I am bitching about the heat wave that invariably hits my little part of the universe. This summer, of course, is no different. Philly is in the middle of a heat wave and it feels like shit. You global warming deniers can kiss my black ass. So anyway, it's 10:00PM at night and the heat index is 101 degrees outside. Can you believe that shit? 101 degrees!
So anyway, I am browsing the web from the comfort of my home, when I stumble on the article below written by Simone Weichselbaum for Philly.com. It seems that one of the unintended consequences of all the violence that we have been having in our city is all the orphans it has been creating. As if they don't have enough problems, now these poor children have been left motherless and without their family support system as well.
It just breaks your heart, but it's one more sad reality of life in the hood.
"LITTLE JABRAE BISHOP banged his head against the armrest of his grandmother's soft leather sofa and murmured: "I wish I was dead. Then I could be with Mommy." The announcement was enough to tear his older brother, Tyjae, and sister, Imajanae, from the TV, where they sat frustrated and despondent over the barrage of commercials for Mother's Day gifts. As each ad aired, Tyjae, then 8, begged for the holiday to be over. Two weeks earlier, the three children had said goodbye to their mother: She was shot to death on April 29. The slaying of Zenelia Bishop, 30, threw her three children into an emotional storm of doubt and despair. 'Nobody wants violence in this world,' said Imajanae, 13, after Jabrae, then 7, settled down next to her on the love seat. Imajanae wore a white memorial T-shirt that featured her mother's face. 'Whoever did this should go to jail for a long time,' she whispered. With the city's homicide count mounting for the third year in a row, police say they are seeing more orphans. The system struggles to help these children — as do the families who often take them in. Caseworkers and family members must reconstruct the home and school lives of the kids left behind, as they must when a single parent dies of natural causes. But children orphaned to murder also must deal with the fear and anger of losing their parent to violence. The result can be a crippling family crisis. 'Every murder has a ripple effect on those closest to it,' said Sgt. Tim Cooney, who supervised the investigation into Zenelia Bishop's killing. "When a woman, especially a hardworking, loving mother like Ms. Bishop, is murdered, the ripples seem to stretch wider and deeper, affecting more and more people. Entire families are forever changed and left in a state of disorder," Cooney said. Experts say childrenlike the Bishops are forced to cope with psychological traumas unlike those experienced by children who lose a parent to disease. They struggle with anxiety and fear, as well as with sudden disruption in the lives they've known. The Bishop trio have no father in their lives, and had no other choice but to move in with their Aunt Ruth, a kind woman who was raising her own two sons inside a cramped, two-bedroom apartment in the Tioga section. Ruth Bishop, 37, refused to place her sister's children in foster care, so the brood now is drifting in an off-the-radar bureaucracy known in city government as informal kinship care. It's a system overrun with obscure custody statutes and endless paperwork. Making everything worse, on the day the family buried Zenelia Bishop, Ruth lost her $13-per-hour job as a cook after Smokey Bones Barbecue & Bar in the Northeast closed. She now survives on $1,230 per month in unemployment benefits. 'I am overwhelmed,' said Ruth Bishop. 'Everything is pretty much left up to me.' After one afternoon spent with a reporter, Bishop said, the children cried. They knew their slain mother had caused the reporter's visit. After that interview, she asked that the press speak only to her about the case. The kids were too upset. "
"Either they don't know, don't show, or don't care about what's going on in the hood. They had all this foreign shit. They didn't have shit on my brother, man."
(Doughboy) Ice Cube~~Boyz N the Hood~~~
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