The Chiefs lost, a Kardashian got married, oh yeah, and some black kid almost got killed.

Can I get a priority check here? Testing, testing, 123, hello is there anybody in there? I'm finding tons of coverage about the Chiefs loss, a plethora of news about a lone black male in an over sized white T shirt who is the target of a big search, after shooting at the cops, good luck with that, Iran fired a missile on the other side of the world, but I really had to look for The Story. A 13 year old boy gets hit by glass, from a bullet that narrowly missed him, while he is inside of a school building, and it garners maybe 2 minutes of reporting and a couple of paragraphs. I hate to start out the week pointing out the disparity in coverage, but I'm afraid I must.

The shooting, a road rage incident, occurred on the east side, or as our Mayors lovely wife once referred to it, on The Black Side of town. Some sociopath fires on a car that had two children inside it, several stray rounds hit the old Southeast High school building, which is apparently a magnet elementary school now, a bullet goes through a window, close enough for the shards of glass to strike a 13 year old, and..........wait..........hold it.........nothing. The news crews showed up, nobody was killed or seriously wounded, so the story dies on the vine. Had this occurred north of the river, or god forbid, west of the state line, coverage would have preempted regular programming until next Wednesday. Since it was east of the equator/Prospect, it's business as usual, right?

I don't tend to cut folks in the black community a whole lot of slack, I don't give the young gangstas much sympathy, or the folks who sit silent on the east side, complacent and tolerant of the predators who have decimated their neighborhoods. I don't usually buy into the rhetoric about how the media doesn't do enough, or the police don't do enough, or the city doesn't do enough. I don't have a problem pointing out the hypocrisy of activists, the blame shifters who indict white America for their lack of empathy, while refusing to accept responsibility for their own complacency. I think it's lazy and self serving, I figure people need to clean up their own messes. That said, the scant coverage of this latest incident has given me pause, it's making me rethink my way of looking at , if not all, at least some of the mayhem that occurs with such regularity that a child being almost killed inside of a school is deemed less important, less newsworthy than another loss from a sub par football team.

It's not the fault of the JoCo soccer mom, or the middle class Waldo resident, that the media moves on to the story that will pull in the viewer or reader. But I wonder if we haven't all become a little jaded, if the ongoing carnage that effects this city hasn't desensitized us all to the point of not caring. I'm not ready to jump on the "It's Racism" bandwagon, but I'm not going to stand in its way as it comes down the road. You can argue that the incident would have drawn more coverage in Blue Springs because it would be a rare occurrence, you can say "nobody was seriously hurt, so it wasn't big news", you can point back to my own often stated argument that the people on the east side need to clean up their own mess, but none of those arguments really hold water. Among the sparse coverage, I couldn't find any description of the shooter/shooters. But it occurred off of Meyer and Prospect, so I'll assume the suspects didn't roll out of Mission Hills, I'll assume they were probably from the area, I'll assume that the suspects are black. Since the school is some kind of Magnet African studies elementary school, I'll assume the child is also black. While I'm on the train going through Assumption Junction, I'll also go out on a limb and say that it's a safe bet the media would have been all over this story like stink on a pig if this had happened in a predominately white area.

I don't blame the media or the public in general for not falling all over themselves every single time someone is shot or killed on the east side. More often than not it isn't some random shooting, the victim is often as dirty as the shooter, gangs and drugs more often than not are the catalyst behind the violence. When people attempt to blame everyone but the major players in the latest incident, I find it to be disingenuous and lazy. But when a child, is almost killed by a random bullet, in an elementary school, it's a big deal, regardless of where it happens. When the media fails to really dig into the story, when that story garners so little attention, it lends credence to the allegations that "nobody cares when it's a black kid". To pretend otherwise would make me a bigger hypocrite than the people I often accuse of playing the race card. So if anyone accuses the media and city officials of not caring that a kid was almost killed, based on the child's race, you won't get any argument out of me. Not this time.