Together, Toward Safety

While a five-year-old fought for his life after Tuesday’s shootings at the Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills, San Fernando Valley residents struggled to repair their spirits in the aftermath of the day’s horror. It wasn’t an earthquake or fire but something even more incomprehensible: a hate-filled rampage that left a Filipino-American postal carrier dead on his Chatsworth mail route and three children and two community center day-care workers wounded.

Buford O. Furrow Jr., a Washington state man described as an extreme racist with a history of mental health problems, surrendered to authorities Wednesday morning. But while his arrest eased immediate fears that a gunman was still at large, it does not provide assurances that another will not just as inexplicably appear, spurred on by hate or madness or a sick desire to grab the world’s attention.

That’s what made Wednesday night’s gathering at the North Valley Jewish Community Center--or rather, at a neighboring Episcopal church--all the more courageous.

Yes, there was fear and a heightened concern over security. And there was no mistaking this for normal times, what with the sheer number of media satellite trucks outside the church and the now sadly familiar sight of flowers piled in a spontaneous altar.

But there was also a table laden with cookies and fruit, adults who hugged each other and children still eager to play. There was, above all, a kind of defiant joyfulness that rang out in thunderous applause for the Episcopal church’s solidarity, for the police and fire departments’ heroics and, most of all, for the director of the day-care center, who drew a standing ovation from the overflowing crowd.

Such pluck deserves all Angelenos’ applause, and such suffering, as experienced by the families at the community center and the family of the slain Joseph Ileto, our comfort. We need to stand up for each other and against the scourge of bigotry and hate crimes, to stand together. As Mayor Richard Riordan eloquently put it, “Our city is made up of people who care for each other, who respect each other and who want our children to live their lives without fear. Together we must and we will get beyond this dark moment. Together we will emerge as a better and stronger community.”

There will be more meetings, more talk about security and a reluctant shutting of once-open doors now that the North Valley Jewish Community Center is, as one speaker lamented, the most well-known center in the country. But what was most important Wednesday night was the declaration that no gunman can shatter a community’s spirit. Like that five-year-old boy, this community is a fighter.