Affects

The event of the University of Memphis football player, Taylor Bradford, getting shot immediately affected me in two very distinct and opposite ways. The terrible event had the physical affect of me not going to school the following Monday yet had a different affect on me mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

The event first started affecting me at 6:00 in the morning on Monday when my mom wakes me up and tells me classes have been canceled due to a murder on the Memphis campus. At this point my heart sinks into my stomach and I check my phone for verification of my canceled classes. After I get passed the shock of a murder that happened at a place where I am five days of the week I sigh a breath of relief for not having to go to my classes today and I role back over to get another three hours of sleep.

After waking up and finding a name and details to put with this tragic event my heart sinks again. The news that it is a football player that was killed hit close to home for me personally and it also made my mind jump straight to my classmate Kennan. Kennan is on the football team and when that piece of news came to me I worried about him. Not only was I just thinking about Kennan but I was thinking about football players in general. These guys are supposed to be invincible, like superman, they aren’t suppose to die when their life is just now starting. Football players are the strong, fast, and big guys that don’t let anything stop them. Thinking about this just makes me sad and even mad that someone out there thinks they have the right to take life like that.

After feeling sad and even mad about the situation my feelings turn to worry. I begin to think of how I need to be more careful about my surroundings and how I need to protect myself at all times because if this can happen to a football player that is bigger, faster, and stronger than me then who am I to stop it from happening to me. This leaves me feeling hopeless in a city that is swamped with incidences like this one all the time.

Dealing with this hopelessness will affect me for the rest of my life. Because of this event the next time I am walking down the street at night and I see a black man walking toward me the hair on the back of my neck is going to stand on end and every muscle in my body is going to brace for the worse. This is something that I will subconsciously do because of this event in my life. Even though the black man is only having car trouble and needs to use a phone to call his wife I will think back to all the times I watched the ten o’clock news and saw the city of Memphis had a murder today. That man does not deserve for me to immediately think of him as a threat but through my experiences I will distinctively feel threatened by him.

Though this event may seem just like another tragedy in our lives it really is one of the things that make us who we are. It changes the way I walk in life and the way I view life, this event affects everything I do either directly or indirectly.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the Memphis football team and the family of Taylor Bradford.