Sturtz Stuff

In May 2012 Marina Keegan graduated from Yale University. She wrote an essay for her graduating class entitled “The Opposite of Loneliness.” Part of her essay reads: We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place. It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together and are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s 4 am and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. We won’t have those next year. We won’t live on the same block as our friends. We won’t have a bunch of group texts. This scares me more than finding the right job or city or spouse. I'm scared of losing the web we’re in....

On August 8, 2011, just before sunrise, two car loads of white teens hit the road of Jackson Mississippi. They had been drinking through the night. At some point in the early morning they came to the conclusion that their mission was to find any black person and just mess them up. It did not take long to find their victim walking across the parking lot of the Metro Inn on the outskirts of town. His name was James Craig. James was a 49 year old autoplant worker and was walking to his car. The group attacked Anderson, beat him up and robbed him.  One of the teens, Deryl Dedmon Jr., after participating in the beat down took things to another level. While James was on the ground injured from his beating, Deryl walked over to his Ford F150. He turned his truck on and ran James over, killing him. It would be easy to write off this act off as the alcohol-fueled actions of some teennagers gone wild. But they didn’t set out to mess with just anyone. They purposely sought out someone who had...