Seventeen seconds. That’s the time it took for Hollywood star Jamie Foxx to record a simple, but powerful message to our community — stop the killing.

Foxx, like many outside, Natchez, see the tragedies that have beset our community in the past year and are stunned by the pointlessness of it all.

In 12 months, 14 people have been murdered, most related to a years’ long feud of sorts between two rival, neighborhood gangs.

Foxx’s theatrical success has served him well. He’s bound to be worth tens of millions of dollars, yet the tragic end of life that has affected so many Natchez families last year weighed heavy on him, enough so that he made the short, but special message to Natchez.

If someone from outside the area, someone who is a virtual stranger to all of those victims who have died and their families is affected enough by the tragedy to get involved and effectively say, “I love you,” to those affected, can’t we do the same?

While it’s easy to read of the news and chalk the deaths to another statistic, most of the victims are children, children whose lives for whatever reason have taken them down a dark, lonely path.

The solution to the cultural problems behind the killings will not be fixed overnight.

But the fix will begin when we all view the problem as a community problem, not just someone else’s problem.

The fix will continue when we all accept and approach one another with love, not hate, open-mindedness, not judgment.

Taking this first step can take as little as 17 seconds.