Enquirer Opinion Editor Kevin Aldridge is right to grieve. His recent column captured what decent people feel when another young man dies over something as senseless as a cell phone on a Metro bus. The sadness is real. The moral concern is genuine. But grief, repeated often enough without action, becomes its own kind of statement − that this is simply the way things are.
It is not the way things have to be.
The truth our leaders keep stepping around is this: Black children and young adults are killing their peers in this city, week after week, and no one in power is saying it with the urgency the fact demands. Not loudly. Not plainly. Not in a way that suggests the people responsible for governing this city find it intolerable rather than merely tragic.
Grief without action changes nothing
This is not about race. It is about a city that is failing a generation of young men − and about whether Cincinnati is willing to do something about it together…