Buffalo: Love Over Hate (18MAY2022)

Today, Saturday, 14May2022, I was at my son’s Little League baseball game at Shoshone Park in North Buffalo. It is our neighborhood ballpark, walking distance from our home. It was a beautiful, bright sunny day. His game ended at around 1500. After the game, we went to the snack shack to pick up a freezer pop. While we were waiting our turn, Mayor Brown made his way past us. This was not the first time I had seen the Mayor out and about in the city, although his demeanor was different on this occasion. He was cordial, but he was moving fast, not taking a lot time to stop and chat with constituents.

At the time, little did I know that 3.2-miles away a racially-motivated, domestic terror attack had unfolded approximately 30-minutes earlier at a supermarket in a predominantly black neighborhood. Mayor Brown was leaving in hurry because he had to respond.

An 18-year-old from a community located 3.5-hours away, spent months methodically developing an evil plan for acting out on his radical, hateful rhetoric. The excerpts from his manifesto are dark. The concepts contained therein were, as far as we known, predominantly born from the dark corners of the internet - allowed to set and reinforce in the echo chamber that the shooter built within his own mind. He chose the Tops supermarket on Jefferson Avenue because of the neighborhood demographics. He researched the neighborhood’s racial makeup, and once he learned it to be majority black, he selected that particular supermarket as the venue where he would murder innocent people.

The shooter was armed with a military-grade assault rifle. It had been illegally modified with a higher capacity magazine. He was wearing tactical body armor. The security guard at the supermarket, a hero, a retired City of Buffalo Police Officer named Aaron Salter, confronted the shooter, engaged him, and shot him. The bullet(s) did not penetrate the attacker’s body armor. Aaron Salter lost his life trying to save others. He died a hero. Ten Buffalonians were killed in the attack, an additional three were wounded. People were killed while shopping for groceries, while buying a cake for their toddler’s birthday, while at work, while responding to the attack.

Heartbroken, yes - absolutely. Broken, no - never. Buffalo will endure. This city is home to some of the toughest people I know. Those that were lost will never be forgotten. Never.

Our country is a country built on a set of ideas, ideas enshrined in law. Our commonality as a populace comes from these ideas and our belief in them. We did not all come from the same place. We do not all look the same. We do not all speak the same way or even the same language. We practice different religions. Some of us are richer, some of us are poorer. We are bound together by our ideas and belief in them.

Our union is not perfect, far from it (from the beginning it has had flaws), but we are working each day to make it more perfect. We will not let this terrorist attack to detract from our goals, from the painstaking progress we have made thus far. We will not allow our country to be torn apart and destroyed by hate, by racism.

Buffalo will endure. The people of this beautifully diverse city will choose love over hate. Our country will endure. The people of this beautifully diverse country will choose love over hate.

I love you.

MB

In Loving Memory:

Roberta Drury

Celestine Chaney

Andre Mackniel

Katherine Massey

Margus Morrison

Heyward Patterson

Aaron Salter

Geraldine Talley

Pearl Young

Ruth Whitfield