Jeremiah Valencia had a terrible childhood, and nearly every adult in his life failed him in some way. There. It feels good to rip the bandage off and get that out of the way.
Sometimes bold, declarative statements like that can rub people the wrong way — they tend to think you’re judging people too harshly. “Judge not,” they say. “Walk a mile in their shoes,” they say. If you know me, you know I’ve run a marathon in those shoes, listeners.
“Surely there must have been a grandparent or uncle or someone who didn’t fail Jeremiah Valencia, right?” A 13 year-old boy is dead. The fact alone means nobody is innocent, and our first, reflexive, knee-jerk reaction should not be one of aversion and defensive posturing.
Guilt is good.
We should feel guilty.
It’s our first step toward acknowledging that there’s something we could have done better for Jeremiah Valencia.
There’s an old Buddhist passage that has been translated and interpreted with a different meaning than the original, but it is no less profound. Paraphrasing, it goes “Only three things cannot remain long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.”
In the case of Jeremiah Valencia, nobody has the moral high ground to say they did everything they could, so I’ll say it again because it’s the truth.
Nearly every adult in Jeremiah Valencia’s life failed him in some way, and it cost him his life.
Our challenge now, as a community, is to accept our share of the blame and learn from it, so it never happens again. If Jeremiah’s story can teach us how to do that, then his death will not have been in vain.

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