"...do the right thing, please come forward. I know it will be hard, but my son's dead."
It's been 6 days since 11 year old Rhys Jones was senselessly shot in the neck by a hooded teen on a BMX bike. Six days of torment for his family, his friends and a community struggling to understand how something like this could ever happen. Six days for a nation to look at itself in the mirror.
In those 6 days the face of Rhys in his Everton football top has been plastered on the television and the front pages of newspapers, and by now there is the temptation for the public to become "tired" of seeing this picture, to become "weary" from the continuous coverage of this tragic story - like hearing your favourite song overplayed on the radio, until you can no longer stand to hear it.
But I would stop you there, and urge you to think before complaining at this overdose of sad, bad news. Think to yourself, when the television stops it's coverage, and the newspapermen move on to the next sleazy politician - what will happen to Rhys?
Well the answer is simple, Rhys Jones becomes a statistic. The tragic few seconds that altered the course of a family's lives for all time will be confined to some public record, where his name will simply indicate another death, another number, another statistic.
Melanie Jones continues in her interview,
"we were determined to keep Rhys in the media, in people's minds" and right she is too!
Consider if you will the following information:
Rhys Jones is the 17th young victim of gun crime in the last 6 months (please forgive me for myself using Rhys as a statistic). But while we focus on one family and one small boy, we should not forget the other 16 families that have endured the same gut wrenching pain of having a young life ripped from their hearts in the last 6 months.
Do you remember the name Millie Dowler at all?
If not I would urge you to remind yourself about her... A murdered teen whose killer remains on the loose, but whose story is not told on the television or in the newspaper.
I am not trying to offend anyone, nor make a situation worse.
But society almost seems to be at a cross roads just at this point.
Unless we break the hold that fear has over our lives, unless we take back control of our streets, our neighbourhoods, our communities, unless we have the courage to stand up, to have our voices heard over the hooded thugs who would have us cower in fear, we risk more statistics. We risk more and more of these senseless killings, these tragic headlines, until they no longer make us ill with disgust, sick to our stomachs asking "Oh God, why?".
We risk becoming desensitised to this to the point of becoming used to more and more statistics being written in some politicians counting book and never asking "why?"
