A SMALL TOWN'S HORROR!

Violence comes, like a dark shadowy cloud, bringing with it the stench of death amid public outcries. That's the headline of the story of a little town in Illinois. While the seedier underbelly of the town is something most of us are all too familiar with, what followed the disaster that was the year 2020, has to be the worst start off to a new year the citizens of Galesburg Illinois have endured. This is the true story of how my hometown started off in 2021.

It all started off like any other new year, with the promise of something better than the last. Like most mature adults, people tried to gather and ring in the year, the best they could in the midst of a pandemic that swept the nation. The younger generation, no doubt, spent New Years' Eve partying, if they could find somewhere to go. After a long year locked up inside our homes and away from the local night scene, it would be a quiet end to a year we all wanted to forget, until two-thirty in the morning. It all, somehow, seemed to go downhill from there.

Shots rang out in the night, waking people from as far away as a half-mile or more. When you've spent a life around guns, you start to get familiar with the sound of gunfire. The BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, usually at a more even, rhythmic pace than fireworks, echoes for a long distance but holds an unmistakable effect over our imaginations and our senses. They alert us to danger, in the distance and make us wonder, will it be close by before it's through. We turn our scanners on, trying to figure out what we heard and where it happened. It's the curiosity in all of us, a curiosity that is there for our own protection. Most people, with the exception of a select few, run from the sound of danger, from the sound of gunfire. Only a select few go towards the sound.

Just like that, it's over in moments. The sounds of bullets flying in the distance are replaced by silence and the aftermath of someone or some people's irreverence for human life. Four people are shot and the police are on the move, tracking down the victims, interviewing witnesses, and developing a suspect. But, what about the people that live in the town, the neighborhoods, and the area? What kind of effect, if any, should the events have on the average Joe citizens of a small town of thirty-two thousand people when these things happen? There's something seldom looked at when violence erupts in small-town America, the effect on the rest of the world.

It'll take less than five days for the next event to unfold. It would not come in the middle of the night, like the first. The town would be treated to more violence in broad daylight that would carry on into the earliest hours of darkness. In a strange twist, of which I'm sure there's no reasonable explanation, a mother of small children would go on to shoot another woman, a mother, multiple times. The lives that are affected by this can not be measured. A motherless son, children who will not see their mother outside of the prison system in their lifetimes, and little answers for the people that knew them. Those aren't the kind of details that make it into the papers. Motives, those things are established as part of the factual information to be presented in court.

Just days later, a group of teens will walk into a gun and ammo store, attempting to rob the owner while he's there. It's an ill-fated mission and perhaps an indictment of the American educational system. How? I wondered as I read it, how could seventeen and eighteen-year-olds, from any walk of life, be so incredibly foolish as to think robbing a gun store is a smart bet. Putting aside that there are federal implications to gun-related crimes, most of the people that own or work in a gun store are probably capable of defending the store. As, was in the case of this crime, evident by the fact that the boys came under fire from the armed and ready gun store owner. One life is gone, others in ruins, and families left to wonder what they did wrong. The co-conspirators are all facing murder charges because Illinois law allows for the participants in a crime, who took action towards its' commission, to be charged with murder if someone is killed in the commission.

Some might say that it was just a rush of action, an anomaly, and I would hope that they are correct. But, is this some sign of things to come? Have the effects of the C0vid-19 pandemic on the psyche of our fellow citizens started to rear some ugly Cerberus? Only time, that is what should tell the answer, right? If you answered in the affirmative, unfortunately, you're mistaken.

Tragedy seems to keep pouring down around us in the new year. In twenty-four days, a normally sleepy little town with its' smattering of big-city problems, has now witnessed one of the most heinous, brutal, and shocking crimes imaginable. A twenty-nine-year-old mother, just hours ago, repeatedly stabbed a seven-year-old child. How, I ask, is this even possible. The town I grew up in has had multiple murders in just twenty-four days, the last of which, a child, killed by her own mother...

"Monsters" exist inside us all. It's what the devil on your shoulder is whispering to as he tries to push you over the cliff. Most of the time, people are capable of pushing down those urges, suppressing them until they have them under control. When they're unleashed, that's when innocents, even the world, become the target of humanity's pent up rage and anger. In 2021, in the sleepy little town in the Western Central part of Illinois, the monsters appear to have been unleashed. But, is this a sign of things to come, a sign of the effects the previous year has had on so many of us, or is this just the devil doing what the devil does?