What do you care about? What I mean is, what gets your heart thumpin’? Is it soccer? Women’s rights? Same-sex marriage? Money? Coffee?

This post is sponsored by Peet’s Coffee & Tea, which is conducting what it calls the first social sampling experiment to launch their new Single Cups. It took them five years to develop this product — sounds like they’re fellow perfectionists, right? But that’s good, because you know you want your coffee done right. For this experiment called Give A Cup, each week you can go to doyougiveacup.com and vote on a topic. They are current, fun and like me, a little quirky. Your votes determine where Peet’s hosts its sampling events each week. So, what do I Give A Cup about?

What’s fresh on my mind is an interview I had recently with a mom whose son was shot to death just outside his church on Chicago’s South Side. He was going to choir practice and suddenly came a spray of bullets. The interview is for a story I’m working on about Chicago’s violence problem, and talking to this mom about her son while mine played in the living room struck a chord within me. So much that it’s really all I can think about.

Image by Lachlan Hardy.

I’d planned on writing this post about weight loss struggles, zombies or even overalls’ return to the runway. I couldn’t really decide. Then came my interview. And all I can think about is how completely unfair this is. Here’s a woman, a mother of three, who along with her husband, did everything “right” in raising a family and yet, and yet. This happens. He is killed and seven years later the case is still unsolved.

What’s worse is when I asked her for contact information of other parents I could talk to who also lost a child to violence, she rattled off names as if she was reading from a list of the local PTA board. Really. These killings are an epidemic and I don’t know what the answer is, my heart just breaks for these families. And how these families could be my family and how in some sense they are my family. They’re all our kids.

So to answer Peet’s question, that’s what I give a cup about. What about you? (Note: it doesn’t have to be anything serious, it could be something as fun as your love of puppies or no-chip manicures.) And don’t forget to go to doyougiveacup.com, it’s cute.

Image and value provided by our partner, Peet’s