Every day in Iraq and Afghanistan, our fellow citizens kill people.  We pay them for what they do.  But I want to believe that they suffer many sleepless nights because of it. 

Ask the wife of a man who came home from the Second World War or Korea or Vietnam.  Ask the wife of a man who was not the same man who had gone off to the fields of battle.  Ask them, and they will tell you that people forced to take a human life – even for a just cause – instinctively know that they have transgressed a great boundary, and they will never be the same again.

But not everyone.

On the streets of our cities, people take human lives every day, and they do not lose one minute of sleep.  They do not sink into deep depression.  They do not die inside.  Maybe they don’t die inside when they take a life because they died inside a long time ago.  Even when they are only 18, maybe they died inside a long time ago.

Imagine taking a gun and killing a person over a lost fistfight.  Imagine taking a gun and killing a person over a broken string of beads.  Imagine taking a gun and killing a person over anything less than the most noble and selfless of causes.  And, even then, imagine taking a gun and killing a person and not feeling a crushing pain that will follow you for the rest of your life.

What must have happened in the life of that tragic 18-year-old man who killed Jameel Clark?  What must have happened in his life – the life only of a child -- that could have stripped him of the very thing that makes us human?

The death of Jameel Clark, and the nearness of his death, forced me to confront social decay as I never had before.  But even then, I was not prepared for the horror that was still to come.  The op-ed piece I published in Friday’s Morning Call had barely appeared online when the vicious, hate-riddled responses began to be posted.  Do not fool yourself into thinking that we can protect ourselves from social decay by fleeing to the tree-lined streets of the suburbs.  Do not think that it rots only the hearts of young black men or young Latino men in the broken city.  Do no think that the jackals are all Latin Kings.  The decay spreads wide, and most of the time it is as invisible as air.

If it were only a rot in the hearts of the Latin Kings, we could at least hope to control it.  We could look for the gang gesture, the gang colors, the gang markings.  And we could run.  And until Friday, I fear that I was naïve enough to think that something like that was true.

But then the responses began to mount in response to my article.  Many times standing here and writing on the pages of the Morning Call I have said that I am not afraid to live in Center City Allentown.  And even with the death of Jameel Clark, it is still true.  But I am deeply afraid to live in a world with the people who responded to my op-ed.

On Friday, I went door-to-door in this neighborhood.  I handed out letters.  I invited our neighbors to stand with us today.  I told them that we are with them, and we will not leave. 

A young man came walking toward me down one of the many alleys that cut through our neighborhood.  I looked him in the eye and I shook his hand.  And I told him exactly what I had told everyone else:  The man on oxygen with the Marine flag flying from his house; the empty-eyed 30-year-old women still in her winter pajamas on a hot summer afternoon; the skeptical looking woman with the enormous flat-screen TV and the huge diamond-studded belt buckle shaped like a dollar sign. 

The young man shook my hand.  And I told him why I was there.  And as he took the letter from me, I saw that  the mark of the Latin Kings was tattooed on the back of his hand. 

In that instant, he and I knew that we stand on two sides of a great divide.  But he extended his hand to me, and we stood there, palm-to-palm, man to man, eye to eye.  And I was not afraid.  We were like two soldiers in a complex war protected by the rules of engagement.

The horror was yet to come.  I came back to my office.  And I looked at my op-ed on the website of the Morning Call.  And then I was afraid.  I was afraid as I read the comments that had been posted.  The writers:  so full of hate and so cowardly.  No names.  No contact eye-to-eye, man-to-man.  And no marks on their hands, I’m sure, that I would see if I were to meet them in person.  The people who wrote those comments – those cowardly, vicious comments – are surely all as white as I am, and as socially invisible as I am, and as likely as I am to walk unnoticed through the Promenade Center or the Lehigh Valley Mall.  They have no tattoos that would let me know the rot that has claimed their hearts.

The children of darkness are all around us.  Do not for a minute believe that the heart is unstained just because the hand is.

Our very desire to find light in the midst of the deep dark that enveloped our backyard two weeks ago enrages them.  The suggestion that the light was stronger than the darkness enrages them.  And with startling venom, and startling urgency, they fought to deny that the light was real. 

The only thing you got right in the whole article is using the phrase “animal instinct.”  That’s what they are.  That’s what he was.  Animals…

I know let’s make a statue in his image, then the Mcall can come and worship at it.

Find the Latin Kings and the rest of the subhuman culture, round them up, and send them to Guantanomo [sic] Bay.  It is a good reason to keep it open.

…put them all on a boat out in the middle of the ocean and sink it!!!!!

yea but we dont [sic] want to p--s off the rican loving morning call.

And then there were the comments that were so vile that they have been taken off the website, no doubt by censors.  Imagine the hate that is in those people.  Do not for a minute believe the heart is unmarked because the hand is. 

Some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests everything that had happened.  After the priests had assembled with the elders, they devised a plan to give a large sum of money to the soldiers, telling them, “You must say, ‘His disciples came by night and stole him away while were asleep.’” …  So they took the money and did as they were directed.

But the rumor could not be stopped:  the rumor that the Light still burned.  All the maneuvering of the fearful, broken, rotting human heart was no match for the Light.  And the rumor could not be stopped.  And the rumor has not been stopped still.

And now we are his witnesses.  On this corner, in this city, in this broken world, we are the witnesses of the Light.  We will feed the hungry and educate the needy and do what we can so the jobless can find work.  We will try to cut a path though the legal thicket and try to wipe foolish youngsters’ records clean.  And, may it be, before long we will offer hope to torn families and housing to people who live under the bridge.  But above all, we will not run.  We will not shrink from the darkness, we will never surrender to it, but we will stand strong, and we will build a fire.

We are the children of the Light.  We are his witnesses.  And no matter how close the darkness comes, no matter how deep it grows, we will never sell out.  We will never deny what we know to be true.  We will build a fire because a fire burns in us.  A fire that we did not set.  And we will huddle together in its light and in its warmth, and we will not leave, no matter how dark and cold it becomes.