Blessings and Options
A senseless murder and the death of hope. There were other options.
2009-01-29
By Eric Easter

"If all else fails, UPS is hiring."

That's a long-standing joke in the Black community intended for people whose lofty dreams don't turn out according to plan. But it's also meant as a down-home dose of perspective that says no matter how far your hopes go astray, there are always options. They may not be the options you'd prefer, but they are options nonetheless.

Apparently nobody ever said this to Ervin Lupoe, who after having the presence and clarity of mind to pen a suicide note to KABC, fax it and then call police to blame the shootings on someone else, killed his wife and five beautiful, healthy, innocent children.

In his words (with his misspellings):

"So after a horrendous ordeal my wife felt it better to end our lives and why leave our children in someone's else's hands, in addition it seems Kiaser Permanente wants us to kill ourselves and take our family with us. They did nothing to the manager who stated such, and did not attempt to assist us in the matter, knowing we have no job and 5 children under 8 years with no place to go. So here we are."

But Ervin Lupoe had options. He destroyed the life of his family in a home that he owned. The biggest house on the block, neighbors say. Not a shelter. Not a beat up double-wide grounded on crumbling cinder blocks.

At the time Lupoe did the horrible deed, UPS had sixteen job openings within a 100 mile radius of the family's home in Wilmington, California.  But if UPS was too much of a stretch for someone in the health insurance field, there were other choices. The results of a Google search show that the Cypress, California office of United Healthcare Group - a mere 22 miles away from Wilmington - had 638 job openings as of yesterday, 33 of them at salaries above $110,000. Jobs.com listed 20, 360 openings in Wilmington, California.

Ervin Lupoe had options.

Without enough information, news editors were quick to try to make this story into one about the perils of the nation's economy and the desperation of the average working man. It wasn't that story at all, though that may have played a part.  Lupoe and his wife were fired, by all reports for a legitimate cause. When situations take this far a turn, there is always more to the story. And this one was of a man incapable of seeing hope and who selfishly transferred his lack of vision to the people with the most potential to make his dreams happen.

But a story that did not turn out to be what it looked like does not negate that millions of Americans are suffering and facing extremely tough decisions. People are hurting and we no longer have a president we hate to blame it on and make us feel superior in the face of his incompetence. There's a new guy offering big promises and the pressure is on.

But life is all about perspective. American children are not working in sweatshops or being pulled from their mothers at the age of 8 to become soldiers. Dust storms are not forcing migrations West and most people couldn't find the North Star or follow the drinking gourd if you paid them to.  Working men are not populating soup kitchen lines by the thousands ­yet.

When we launched this website, my colleagues and I had an idea to run a looped video of a cotton field as a permanent reminder to people of how far we've come, even in our worst times. It may be time to revisit that idea.

Perspective.

It's incredibly cliché, but never more true, that in times of sorrow, pain and woe we must take time to breathe, rediscover what's real and count our many blessings.

Ervin Lupoe and his wife had at least five.

Eric Easter is Chief of Digital Strategy for Johnson Publishing, Co., Inc. He writes about politics, culture and technology for EbonyJet.com