I close my eyes and I can still see the 10-year-old bright-skinned boy sitting on my couch. His blue eyes were filled with both innocence and attitude.</p><p>We used to baby-sit him back then, let him tag along to the mall and hang out with us at home. He&rsquo;d sit in on conversations college students like to have &mdash; debates about religion, relationships and album of the year.</p><p>I imagined him doing a lot of things, graduating from college, possibly becoming a music engineer. What I never predicted was his funeral. He was murdered last week, buried at the age of 22.</p><p>And no, he wasn&rsquo;t a gang-banger. He came from a two-parent home in suburban Maryland.</p><p>We like to think violence doesn&rsquo;t affect the good kids who come from the nice neighborhoods. But it does.</p><p>People saw Derrion Albert, the 16-year-old honor student who was brutally beaten to death outside of his Chicago school last month, and many dismissed the murder as an urban issue. They think that&rsquo;s what happens when you live in poverty. </p><p>True, black-on-black violence is a big problem. But we&rsquo;re all kidding ourselves if we don&rsquo;t look beyond race and see that teens of all colors and walks of life are becoming desensitized to violence.</p><p>They see a kid getting his head bashed in with an old railroad tie and run toward the rumpus, cell-phone video cameras rolling. </p><p> Sixteen-year-old Emma Niederbrock, a white girl, was fascinated with the sadistic lyrics of so-called &ldquo;horrorcore&rdquo; music, leading her to invite a man she met online, &ldquo;Syko Sam,&rdquo; to her home in Farmville, Va. As it turned out, his brutal music wasn&rsquo;t just for entertainment. Last month, his visit led to the murders of Emma, her parents and a friend.</p><p>So, no, teen murders don&rsquo;t all stem from inner-city poverty. Type in the words &ldquo;teen&rdquo; and &ldquo;murder&rdquo; in your search engine. The stories that pop up are from all over the map, and there are plenty right here in our city.</p><p>Earlier this month, Keighley Ann Alyea, an 18-year-old Overland Park girl, was reported missing and found dead. Her on-again, off-again abusive boyfriend and two of his friends are suspected of murdering her. </p><p>Then there are the four teenagers in Mont Vernon, N.H., armed with a machete, knife and more, who randomly chose a house to break into and kill anyone inside. That left a mother dead and her 11-year-old daughter hospitalized. Mont Vernon is the opposite of urban. It&rsquo;s a rural town with a general store &mdash; the stuff postcards are made of. </p><p>This is the world we live in. Whether it&rsquo;s inner-city Chicago or a small, quiet town in Virginia, violence is poisoning our teens.</p><p>And now, Michael Brewer, 15, a Florida seventh-grader, will be fighting for his life over the next several months after being set on fire by five other teens. A few of them laughed about it. They threw rubbing alcohol on a human being and used a lighter to torch him. To them, this was amusing. </p><p>I don&rsquo;t know the solution. But we have to start taking action before an entire generation goes genocidal while we watch it all happen on YouTube.