“Another life stolen — 988”
Triennium highlights gun violence and suicide prevention through T-shirt memorial
At Presbyterian Youth Triennium, youth, young adults and youth leaders laugh, play, dance and worship in the pale yellow “PYT” swag T-shirts or in the coordinated baseball jerseys and silk-screened crewnecks made by their delegations. The roar of young voices and the sea of cotton shirts are a sign of new life for those worried about denominational decline and the increasing numbers of “nones” with each new generation.
Those yellow PYT T-shirts are a welcome presence, but inside the Exhibit Hall, unworn T-shirts in all colors proclaim a haunting absence that speaks not to the loss of religion but to another hallmark of Generation Z, which is the loss of lives, particularly through the rise in school shootings and suicides.
Rows of lifeless shirts in red, white and other colors emblazoned with the names of people who have died by guns comprise an installation that is a part of a project by Vidas Robadas (“Stolen Lives”), run by Texas Impact, an interfaith public policy nonprofit. As the first and oldest interfaith public policy nonprofit, Texas Impact has been working with Muslim, Jewish and mainline Protestant groups for over 50 years identifying common issues of concern and raising up faith-informed support for or against related state legislation. In 2023, it began Project Vidas Robadas after the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas by an 18-year-old graduate of the school.
“Vidas Robadas is a gun violence awareness and prevention campaign centered around the creation and display of T-shirt memorials that name and represent people from our communities who have died in gun violence,” explained Bobby Watson, a young adult and policy advocate for Texas Impact, while meeting on Tuesday with 40 young adults participating in PYT’s Young Adult Leadership track. “We create these displays with congregations, universities, non-profits or anywhere geared towards advocacy and education in order to raise awareness."
Divine Redeemer Presbyterian Church, a congregation affected by high suicide rates and gang activity in its community within inner city San Antonio, hosted the first memorial of over 200 T-shirts. Within months, Vidas Robadas assisted with a dozen other displays alongside initiatives to distribute gun safes and a weapons buy-back program at the Alamodome, a major sports center that they filled with 2000 T-shirt memorials in order to create community conversations about gun violence prevention. Later, they took 5000 memorials to the Texas Capitol. Alongside safe storage campaigns, weapons exchanges, protesting the NRA convention, Vidas Robadas have been a part of community violence initiatives in which neighborhoods with high violence rates have been able to identify potential perpetrators and victims of violence and create interventions that have resulted in reductions in homicides in those communities.
Within these memorials, T-shirts of various sizes side by side invoke the intergenerational reality of gun deaths while the variety of colors signify the different ways from suicide, murder and accidental that guns lead to the highest cause of death, especially among children and teens. Colored T-shirts signify murders or gun accidents. White shirts honor suicides which except when given specific family permission were simply inscribed with “Another life stolen — 988,” 988 being the suicide prevention hotline.
“It feels very human. A T-shirt is something they would be wearing if they were alive,” said Bobby Watson, who helped to start the Vidas Robadas project as part of his advocacy work with Texas Impact to engage faithful voices in advocating for gun control in Texas.
The leadership of Presbyterian Youth Triennium invited Vidas Robadas to facilitate a memorial honoring local victims of gun violence as well as those whom youth delegates know. Participants were invited to write the names and ages of the recently deceased drawing either from a list of local gun violence victims or from their personal connections. Since Monday, Vidas Robadas has been hanging up a steady stream of freshly marked T-shirts within the limited display space of their booth and replenishing them with new ones each day. At the end of the week, T-shirts will be sent to congregations around Louisville to be placed along their churchyards like colorful cotton crosses remembering those who were killed.
“Because gun violence is so complicated, there’s never going to be one policy solution,” said Watson. “We are trying to make Vidas Robadas into a format so that it can grow and expand and be taken by everyone at the local level.” He hopes communities will engage in the kind of conversations and coalitions necessary to find solutions for their local contexts. Watson told a group of 40 students participating in this year's Young Adult Leadership Track at Triennium about how Vidas Robadas was the best thing he had been a part of as a young adult before the group processed through the convention center holding up the shirts bearing the words they’d just written. For that short processional, their yellow shirts are obscured and their own nametags laden with pins they’ve traded across delegations are covered by the flowing fabric and the identity of the deceased.
The most chosen color t-shirt among them was no color at all, the most common victim was unnamed: “otra vida robado … another life stolen — 988.”
Videographer Alex Simon contributed to this report.
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