Meanwhile…
by ChrisOctober 30th, 2004 9:25 am
Meanwhile, back in the real world, this story, and thousands of others like it, are regularly ignored. While we routinely focus on fashion choices of our candidates wives, the slaughter of our fellow citizens, chiefly in our poorest communities, continues unabated. It’s a marginal issue, at best, in the current campaign.
The brutality and bloodiness of our society is one of our primary failures as a nation and a people. There is no end in sight. Education policy, narcotics policy, law enforcement policy and economic policy are all relevant to any real strategy towards ending the ongoing massacre and should be reexamined in that light.
Will we ever stop waking up to stories like this?
In Chester Thursday evening, two mothers and their daughters, coming back from picking up dinner, heard gunfire around them and ducked. It did no good: Soon the backseat was filled with blood as the 4-year-old bled from a wound to the head, the 3-year-old from one in the leg.
Two hours later, about 9:30 p.m. in Camden, a young mother realized something was wrong when her talkative 2-year-old suddenly stopped babbling. She looked over to see the toddler slouched in her car seat, a bullet in her brain.
Not with the current lack of serious focus on this issue. No.
November 1st, 2004 at 2:18 am
“Education policy, narcotics policy, law enforcement policy and economic policy are all relevant to any real strategy towards ending the ongoing massacre and should be reexamined in that light”
[warning: extreme sarcasm directed at the current establishment follows]
You mean to say we should actually fund our police departments, pay teachers wages commensurate with their critical role in society, and channel our tax dollars into helping poor kids get out of the streets—perhaps into publicly funded educational community centers? Come on man, that would redirect our tax dollars away from war, and might hurt good god-fearing folk like Bill O Reilly! You killjoy; only a champion of dullness would consider such things.
Hell with that, I’d rather have my tax dollars go to bombs so that we may pursue our new doctrine of preemptive war. That’s exciting! Oh, I love Wolfiwitzs (not spelled halfwits) ideas on global hegemony! Makes great television. I was going to pitch a new TV series called “The NeoCons”, starring Tom Selleck. Don’t you think that would get great ratings? And getting back to the point…fuck the poor! After all, if somebody is poor the reason must be that he or she didn’t work hard enough, so why should they steal from MY pockets to make up for their own gross ineptitute? Lazy bums ought to get real jobs, or just die off. But, oh that’s right, they never listened in class because they were too interested in drugs. Really, that’s a racial genetic trait. I swear it’s true: Everybody knows blacks are more prone to drug abuse than whites, and this is why they never get out of the city. Heck, just ask any Southern Baptist Republican Think Tank! After all, their scientists know best and ought be trusted because Christ is on their side. And we can’t go against God, can we?
OK, obviously I’m joking. The sad (and scary) part is that many extreme republications seem to believe such things implicitly.
My first concern is this: How to we educate the idiots in our own government who support this sort of thought (whether they are fully aware or not)? Moreover, how can we educate half our population enough to demonstrate to them that Bush is a fucking moron?