“My brother had long dreamed of being a police officer. In his mind, it was the perfect job: Enforcing the rules that society lives by, keeping people from doing wrong. He was consistently offended by the decay that he saw in the civil order. His writings were filled with despairing commentary on how people have just increasingly lived according to their own selfish desires, with little concern for others. He struggled to see empathy or kindness in the world, in part because of his stubborn, if flawed, personal sense of moral justice, and in part because of the way he was consistently treated, throughout his childhood.
“One tragic irony of Autism is that, while Autistic people are often accused of lacking empathy, we are so often the victims of a society that lacks empathy towards us. And while I could successfully navigate that irony in a way that made sense to me without destroying my faith in others, my brother could not.
“So for him the police were the last bastion of civilization, holding things together enough to avoid the final decay. This was the jaded reality in which my brother lived. And even though we knew, he knew, that his Autism impacted his abilities too much for him to be successful in law enforcement, still he dreamed.
“Still he dreamed.”
The speaker paused, inhaled, exhaled, stared fixedly at a spot on the floor in front of the lectern. Someone coughed. A pew creaked as someone shifted.
“I will never understand the depth of his cynicism against the world, not fully, but I will also never understand what it was that a sixteen year old having a meltdown could have done that justified his life being cut short by the very people he admired. Seventeen shots. I know it’s become a rallying cry, but for me and my family, it’s a cold statement of reality. A final commentary justifying his fear of the decay of empathy in the world.
“Seventeen shots.”
The speaker paused again, taking a lingering moment to look at the casket, tracing the shape of his brother’s face with his eyes.
And then, one last time, so quiet only a handful of people heard him: “Seventeen shots.”
For Victor Perez.