Choosing Love

When I first started my journalism career, I worked for a small newspaper outside Binghamton N.Y called “The Country Courier.”

The paper was based in a town called Conklin. It was a little speck of a place, and I was just passing through. I hadn’t thought much about Conklin until we learned that the racist murderer who killed 10 people in Buffalo came from there.

There are so many mass shootings in America that it has become easy to grow numb. But this mass murder broke through and hit us square in the heart….until the next one. And there always seems to be a next one.

When I heard that the shooter came from Conklin, it just seemed hard to fathom.

My memories are hazy, but I remember a small bucolic town in the southern part of Broome County near the Pennsylvania border. It has been described as a “Mayberry” kind of place. The 2020 census says a little over 5,000 people live there. Conklin is about 200 miles from Buffalo. It is nearly 98 percent white and less than one percent African American.

I remember covering town meetings and being bored beyond belief. There weren’t a lot of exciting issues in Conklin to write about and I surmise that the people liked it that way. I remember driving home late at night after a council meeting through country roads back to Binghamton and encountering a cow in the middle of the road. We scared each other and I remember thinking how lucky I was to see it before it was too late. I would soon move on and forget all about Conklin until last weekend.

I checked the local coverage of the shooting, knowing that reporters would beat a path to the hometown of the shooter trying to determine if “place” somehow contributed to the hatred and depravity needed to coldly murder 10 innocent people. I had tried the town’s website, but its bandwidth was overwhelmed by people looking for answers. I couldn’t get access.

So, I turned to the local newspapers that I used to know.

The reporters went to a local diner for answers, like I used to do when I moved to Delray and got a job at the old Monday-Thursday Papers. We used to go to Ken & Hazel’s or the Green Owl for the local scoop. In Conklin, that source of local sentiment would be Jane’s, a local landmark.

From the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin:

“Who would think, at age 18, growing up in such a beautiful community, to have such hate?” said Jane Lazaros, who’s owned the restaurant on Conklin Road for 28 years. “What is all this hate?”

That’s the question many in town had on Sunday: Where did the hate come from?

A small town outside Binghamton, Conklin captures the grittiness of much of rural upstate New York. The greater Binghamton area, with about 195,000 residents, has seen better days, with major employers such as IBM long gone from the region, although Dick’s Sporting Goods and Amazon have opened massive warehouses in recent years to provide some relief.”

What is all this hate? It’s a good question, awkwardly phrased, but we know what she means when she says it.

It’s also a question that is sadly familiar for the Conklin community. It was only 13 years ago when a gunman walked into the American Civic Association immigration center in Binghamton and killed 13 people, wounding four others. I had forgotten about that and that me surprised me. Having lived in Binghamton, that shooting should have resonated with me, but there are simply too many heinous acts to remember them all. That’s sickening.

In that incident, the shooter was Vietnamese American, but investigators determined that he was motivated by racism and hatred for immigrants.

Racism and hatred….it’s an affliction we can’t seem to shake.

There’s a coarseness to our society these days that is having an impact. Words are important. They tend to leave marks when loaded with hate. And hateful messages tend to manifest into actions.

And this week I can’t shake the image of Celestine Chaney, 65. She was shopping at Tops with her sister for some shortcake to go with the strawberries she had sliced at home.

Her sister says they were giggling as they decided to make a shrimp salad and picked out rolls, lamenting the high price of food these days. Just two sisters out on a Sunday enjoying what is usually a mundane chore.

It was an impromptu visit to a neighborhood store. Little did they know that 200 miles away a hate-filled murderer, barely an adult, was plotting to kill as many Black people as he could find….

He found Celestine Chaney and 9 others.

It’s hard to find words that can heal this kind of pain.

We also know that our politicians won’t do anything to address the situation. This time, we are not even hearing a whole lot about steps we can take to stop this kind of thing. We know better now. We know our so-called “leaders” won’t do a damn thing except stoke more hatred in an endless cycle that when taken to an extreme leads to bloodshed.

Meanwhile, the hate keeps coming at us. And it’s armed.

Give us strength.