Consoler-in-chief visits city in shock

BUFFALO, N.Y. They call U.S. President Joe Biden the Consoler-in-chief. And right about now, this is a city desperately in need of consolation.

“It’s just too much, it’s just too much,” 66-year-old Gloria Beecher said between sobs as she cried standing on the sidewalk on Delavan Avenue across the street from the community centre where the president spoke Tuesday. She lost a friend in the Tops supermarket shooting, one of the deadliest mass shootings in recent American history.

“He killed 10 innocent people,” she said of a gunman who police say drove three hours from his home in southern New York to target this predominantly Black neighbourhood.

“What is this world coming to? What is it coming to? We’ve got to stop the madness, we’ve got to stop the badness. We hate this system, we’ve got to change the system. Or we’re not going to make it out here.”

Her mixture of grief and anger, her suggestion of needed political and cultural change, was a snapshot of emotions on display throughout the city as it struggles to cope with its shock and loss on the third day after the attack.

It was here Biden came offering both a dose of his famous empathy and a stated resolve that things would change.

Addressing the families of the victims in attendance at his speech, with whom he and his wife Jill Biden had just met privately, Biden said, “The day is going to come, when your loved one, when you remember them, brings a smile to your lips before they bring a tear to your eye. It takes a while for that to happen. It may take more than a season. But our wish for you is that time comes sooner or later.”

In his emotional remarks, Biden spoke of each of the 10 victims and the three recovering after the shooting, personally giving some details of their lives and of the loved ones they left behind.

And he spoke of how the entire country should respond to this attack on a Buffalo community. “I’m bringing you this message from deep in our nation’s soul. In America, evil will not win, I promise you. Hate will not prevail. And white supremacy will not have the last word.”

He spoke of needing to reject the lies of racism, challenging them where they spread online and in politics and media, and of needing tougher gun laws. “We need to say as clearly and forcefully as we can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America,” he said to applause from the audience made up of roughly 150 family members of victims, local and national politicians, and police, firefighters and clergy.

Beecher was not among them. She waited outside hoping to speak to or hear from the president, but said she was disappointed he didn’t even wave to her as his motorcade drove by. She was standing near a handful of community members gathered in protest who said they objected to Biden and the other politicians — including Gov. Kathy Hochul, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown — coming to their community for political posturing rather than to actually meet its needs.

“You come to the hood for a photo-op! Hope you got a nice picture,” one shouted into a megaphone.

A few kilometres away near the Tops supermarket where the massacre occurred Saturday, the scene was less openly political but no less emotional, as dozens of community members huddled across the street from the crime scene embracing each other in tears and shaking their heads next to makeshift memorials of candles, balloons, flowers and homemade signs bearing the names of those who were killed.

“It’s the worst day ever, the worst day ever,” one local resident said to me as she walked by.

At tables set up in a neighbouring parking lot, community volunteers gave out free food — grilled hot dogs and packaged fresh bread — and staple household goods such as baby wipes and underpants. A shuttle bus carried residents to another location of the supermarket chain as this one remained closed for investigation, dozens of police coming in and out through the yellow tape of the perimeter.

In this community, residents say the supermarket was a central gathering place — celebrated when it opened in a famous “food desert” neighbourhood — a crossroads kind of spot where neighbours would see each other.

And now it is where they are grieving together. A man named Mark told me he’d stopped by after work just to be with his neighbours because he didn’t know what else to do. Like others I spoke to, his grief was lined with a sense puzzlement at why anyone would come here to kill these people, who had never even met their attacker or interacted with him in any way before. “I don’t know how people can have so much hate in their hearts,” Mark said. “I just wish we could close our eyes and not see colour. Just get along. I don’t think I’ll see it in my lifetime. I have 24 grandkids. I hope they see it in their lifetimes.”

Wayne Jones Jr.’s grandmother Celestine Cheney was one of those killed in the shooting — she was a 65-year-old breast cancer survivor and single mother, who normally shopped with her only son, Wayne Sr., but had stopped by the supermarket on Saturday alone to pick up strawberries to make shortcake.

“This is hard to process, you take it day by day. You remember the good times even though you’re hurt in this sad moment,” Jones said. He recalled his grandmother, who was the “primary daycare provider” for he and his siblings, would always ask him if he was hungry, and when he said no, she’d ask him how many burgers he wanted, and when he said one, she’d say that she’d make him two. “All the memories — there’s so much, and it breaks you down. But it also makes you smile.”

Jones and 16 other members of the Cheney family met with Biden prior to his speech. He said the president offered his emotional support and listened to their grieving, and promised them — as he did in his public speech — that racism would not win. “We’re going to try to get evil out of here, evil needs to go,” Jones said.

He said he appreciated the president’s visit, and his time with them.

“It just shows that somebody in power cares about us. Cares about us as people, cares about everything that’s going on,” he said. “It wasn’t fake emotion, it wasn’t fake words. It was words that really touch you and make you think, like, this is going to be OK. It’s gonna get better.”