Opinion: There’s a clear lesson for all of us when Steve Kerr and Charles Barkley make clear, impassioned calls for action after the Texas school shooting.
By Greg Moore |Arizona Republic
Don’t go numb; don’t give up hope.
There are few conclusions to draw from the mass shootings at an elementary school, a church and a grocery store, but we have smart people from unlikely walks of life asking pointed questions and challenging those in power to take bold and swift action.
It’s clear we have the will to do something; it’s also clear we have plenty to do.
A basketball coach, Steve Kerr, refused to discuss his sport before a big game on Tuesday night.
“In the last 10 days, we’ve had elderly Black people killed in a supermarket in Buffalo. We’ve had Asian churchgoers killed in Southern California. And now we have children murdered at school,” Kerr said.
Kerr slapped the desk he was leaning on.
“When are we gonna do something?!” he shouted.
Kerr was heavily influenced by his dad’s death
What he said next would shock people who don’t know his background, but Kerr’s impact has always been bigger than basketball.
As longtime Washington Post sportswriter John Feinstein detailed in “One on One: Behind the Scenes with the Greats in the Game” in 1984, Kerr’s father “was president of the American University in Beirut. Steve actually spent a lot of his boyhood in the Middle East. Last January, his dad was assassinated.”
