The distance between Windsor Locks, just to pick a suburban Connecticut town at random, and Hartford may be measured in more than miles.
In Windsor Locks awhile back, there was a triple murder, an affair of the heart, some think. A Lothario who held dual citizenship both in the United States and Italy contracted with a third party to have a husband put out of the way because he had a fancy for the man’s wife, according to early press reports. The wife perversely refused to leave her husband for the star-crossed lover, and so the duel citizen purchased the services of a fellow of low wattage to bump off the husband.
When the bullets stopped flying at the scene of the murder, three people were dead, and the person accused of arranging the contract killing was overcome suddenly with a hankering to visit the Old Country, at which point prosecutors in Connecticut began extradition proceedings. Like most fastidious Euro countries, Italy will not surrender those accused of murder to other nations that may dispose of them through executions. Arrangements between Italy and the United States having been settled, a trial date was set, but any punishment assigned cannot not include the death penalty.
The point to notice about the Windsor Locks mayhem is that the murders were an aberration. The narrative in Windsor Locks might well interest Hollywood or crime novelists because it is unusual -- for Windsor Locks.
Shootings, fatal and otherwise, are more common in Hartford. Last year there were 24 homicides in the city, and no one in the suburbs blinked. Sociologically, Windsor Locks is as far distant from Hartford as the moon. The distance between most Connecticut suburbs -- to which many a weary urbanite has fled -- and Connecticut’s cities is more cultural and sociological than geographical.
It is being said by some commentators that suburbanites are indifferent to the mayhem in Connecticut’s cities.
And why?
Suburbanites, so the theorizing goes, are disengaged from the pathologies of city life: single parent households in which rootless young males join gangs and terrorize neighborhoods; high schools in which, as was reported in Hartford some years ago, more girls became pregnant than graduated, the handiwork apparently of older men preying upon very young girls; random shootings and non-random shootings. Because of their emotional detachment, suburbanites just don’t care about city problems, despite the many warnings of commentators that the pathologies in cities undoubtedly will affect them.
To a certain extent, the warning is true. There were 76 shooting incidents in the Capitol city in 2003 and 86 in 2007, according to the most recent Hartford police crime summary, and despite spending $2,500 per student above the state average, drop-out rates in Hartford were triple the state average.
City schools have become the repositories of the consequences brought about by urban pathologies. The remnants of innocent families caught in the crucible of urban crime carry their fears and behaviors with them as they migrate out into the suburbs. This outmigration has produced a slight spike in criminal activity in some places, and the same outmigration also has deprived cities of responsible citizens who helped to reduce crime rates in urban areas.
The tough-nut-to-crack question is: What is to be done about all this?
If the root cause of urban pathologies is to be found, as some analysts have suggested, in partial family structures – single parent households abandoned by fathers, or those in which fathers never were present – then a solution to the pathologies must include a restoration of more adequate social structures.
What is the possibility that architects of social policy, including politicians and legislators, will in the future dedicate themselves to writing laws and policies that encourage the formation of traditional family structures, remembering that such legislation must include sanctions that discourage less successful forms?
To ask the question is to answer it. There are many powerful political interests arrayed against such a restoration, and politicians are not celebrated for an excess of courage in opposing powerful and politically well connected interests. Children in the cities are the victims of such timidity, not to say cowardice; and however much money is thrown their way, they will continue to be victimized by a system of sanctions and rewards that is blissfully unconcerned with families and convinced – despite clear evidence to the contrary – that it is possible for a village to raise a child in the absence of honorable, loving and working fathers.
In Windsor Locks awhile back, there was a triple murder, an affair of the heart, some think. A Lothario who held dual citizenship both in the United States and Italy contracted with a third party to have a husband put out of the way because he had a fancy for the man’s wife, according to early press reports. The wife perversely refused to leave her husband for the star-crossed lover, and so the duel citizen purchased the services of a fellow of low wattage to bump off the husband.
When the bullets stopped flying at the scene of the murder, three people were dead, and the person accused of arranging the contract killing was overcome suddenly with a hankering to visit the Old Country, at which point prosecutors in Connecticut began extradition proceedings. Like most fastidious Euro countries, Italy will not surrender those accused of murder to other nations that may dispose of them through executions. Arrangements between Italy and the United States having been settled, a trial date was set, but any punishment assigned cannot not include the death penalty.
The point to notice about the Windsor Locks mayhem is that the murders were an aberration. The narrative in Windsor Locks might well interest Hollywood or crime novelists because it is unusual -- for Windsor Locks.
Shootings, fatal and otherwise, are more common in Hartford. Last year there were 24 homicides in the city, and no one in the suburbs blinked. Sociologically, Windsor Locks is as far distant from Hartford as the moon. The distance between most Connecticut suburbs -- to which many a weary urbanite has fled -- and Connecticut’s cities is more cultural and sociological than geographical.
It is being said by some commentators that suburbanites are indifferent to the mayhem in Connecticut’s cities.
And why?
Suburbanites, so the theorizing goes, are disengaged from the pathologies of city life: single parent households in which rootless young males join gangs and terrorize neighborhoods; high schools in which, as was reported in Hartford some years ago, more girls became pregnant than graduated, the handiwork apparently of older men preying upon very young girls; random shootings and non-random shootings. Because of their emotional detachment, suburbanites just don’t care about city problems, despite the many warnings of commentators that the pathologies in cities undoubtedly will affect them.
To a certain extent, the warning is true. There were 76 shooting incidents in the Capitol city in 2003 and 86 in 2007, according to the most recent Hartford police crime summary, and despite spending $2,500 per student above the state average, drop-out rates in Hartford were triple the state average.
City schools have become the repositories of the consequences brought about by urban pathologies. The remnants of innocent families caught in the crucible of urban crime carry their fears and behaviors with them as they migrate out into the suburbs. This outmigration has produced a slight spike in criminal activity in some places, and the same outmigration also has deprived cities of responsible citizens who helped to reduce crime rates in urban areas.
The tough-nut-to-crack question is: What is to be done about all this?
If the root cause of urban pathologies is to be found, as some analysts have suggested, in partial family structures – single parent households abandoned by fathers, or those in which fathers never were present – then a solution to the pathologies must include a restoration of more adequate social structures.
What is the possibility that architects of social policy, including politicians and legislators, will in the future dedicate themselves to writing laws and policies that encourage the formation of traditional family structures, remembering that such legislation must include sanctions that discourage less successful forms?
To ask the question is to answer it. There are many powerful political interests arrayed against such a restoration, and politicians are not celebrated for an excess of courage in opposing powerful and politically well connected interests. Children in the cities are the victims of such timidity, not to say cowardice; and however much money is thrown their way, they will continue to be victimized by a system of sanctions and rewards that is blissfully unconcerned with families and convinced – despite clear evidence to the contrary – that it is possible for a village to raise a child in the absence of honorable, loving and working fathers.
Comments
But Hartford has some world class metrics when it comes to % of kids in the school system in single parent families and with teen pregnancy rates. Near the top if not the highest in the country. (I don't have the latest figures in front of me, seems they are hard to find, go figure).
Despite vast amounts of money and world class experts in Education, it does not seem to get better.
I've often thought, maybe what Hartford needs is a regiment of Irish Nuns armed with yardsticks backed up by a squad of Jesuits.
But I hear, it is getting hard to find a Irish Nun nowadays.
BY LISA RICHARDS
July 28, 2007
The greatest danger to the western world is the perspective of relativism; it’s all just relative. The term has nothing to do with family relations; relativism translated simply means everyone and everything is meaningless, therefore there is no right or wrong, no accountability and no one to be held accountable to. That makes things relatively nice for criminals; they can rob rape and murder and never be responsible to higher authority or God, because God is relative; he does not exist unless the person chooses to believe God exists.
Out of relativism comes the entire belief system of liberalism.
Criminal action is nothing new, neither is the idea that one can get away with whatever one wants, but relativism was fostered to greatness in the nineteenth century by a German philosopher whose writings are said to be the main inspirations behind Hitler’s Nazism; Friedrich Nietzsche, a man who completely rejected the belief of God, embracing his ideas that “what we call truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphimisms,” and what we believe to be “truth” is nothing more than an illusion we create in our mind to serve the purpose of our imagined belief that evil exists in the world and God can over come evil.
To Friedrich Nietzsche all human beings were weak with nothing more than the desire to “will the power” over other people. Nietzsche was a relativist and Freudian proto-type; he denied all absolute truths, including God; he claimed knowledge was nothing more than “useful fiction” created by the human mind to suit human needs; people believe whatever they want to believe, and what ever people see, people can perceive it the way they want. Nietzsche claimed God was nothing more than some imagined “idol” making human beings victims of “wishful thinking.” The doctrinal belief in God and following a religion based on him was completely unreasonable to Nietzsche who claimed God is nothing more than “the effect of what is believed true is mistaken for truth,” and believing in such a figment of the imagination is a psychological error that needed reevaluation for its value.
Nietzsche declared: “God is dead,” and everything is relative; people are nothing but an illusion we invent. Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy is the concept behind relativism.
St. Thomas of Aquinas wrote: “And so it is evident that as to the general principles of reason, whether speculative or practical, there is a single standard of truth and right for everyone which is known by everyone. However when it comes to the specific conclusions of the speculative reason, the truth is the same for everyone but everyone does not equally know it.”
According to the relativist Nietzsche, Aquinas was essentially crazy; it is completely impossible for any human being to “observe outside” such a phenomenon as God, life, creation, etc.; God is simply relative psychology, and whatever we do is simply fine if it is what makes each individual happy.
Atheist enthusiast and Godless Jew Sigmund Freud agreed 100 percent with the anti-Semite German Nietzsche, claiming “the truth is the same for everyone,” and the belief in God is dangerous to the whole of mankind; God is nothing more than an “illusion” created in the mind of a child seeking a parent figure and a way to make good on all the bad things one does in life.
I’m surprised Hitler didn’t erect a statue in honor of the Godless, Atheist Jew loved by the anti-Semite who fostered Hitler’s Nazism.
Again, it’s all relative; do unto others as you wish, because they’re nothing but matter and don’t matter one, damn bit. Relativism is the concept that has been motivating violent criminals in America to commit the most heinous crimes, knowing all along they can commit these crimes, be imprisoned a short time, be paroled, recommit their crimes and be declared mentally insane because they had no understanding of their relative actions.
Thus we come to the latest relative act of nothingness.
On July 23, 2007, two 20-times convicted criminals broke into a Cheshire, Connecticut home and proceeded to torture, rape and murder an innocent family Manson-style. Why, because they could; because the actions were relative; because human beings are nothing more than matter and God does not exist to atone to on judgment day.
At 3 A.m., Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes broke into the home of Dr. Petit and his family while the family slept. Waking Dr. and Mrs. Petit, the two men beat Dr. Petit with a baseball bat, tied him up and threw him down his basement steps; then the two men spent the night repeatedly raping Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two daughters Michaela 17 and Hayley 11. In the morning on July 24, 2007, one man forced Jennifer to drive to the bank to withdraw $15,000 dollars, and then forced Jennifer to drive to a gas station for a container of gasoline.
Jennifer alerted a bank teller to the violence taking place and the teller phoned police. But it was too late. By the time police arrived, the Petit house was in flames, Dr. Petit was laying on his front lawn after managing to crawl out of the basement, Jennifer was found strangled inside the burning house, and her daughters were found tied to their beds where they died from smoke inhalation. The two men were caught as they tried to rush a police barricade.
The two monstrous freaks have been arraigned on charges of assault, sexual assault, burglary, kidnapping, robbery, larceny, and risk of injury to children, and are being held on 30 million dollars bail.
Police say the men could face the death penalty, but prosecutor Michael Dearington is not sure if that is the avenue he wishes to pursue even though “it’s public consensus to wish to fry these guys.”
I know a good avenue Mr. Dearington, the street the two non-human specimens committed their vile acts—the Petit’s street. Let the neighbors and relatives of the family have the criminals for one hour.
As for the death penalty, there will be many who decry this form of punishment as inhumane treatment which serves only to lower ourselves to the level of the criminal. I’m perfectly happy with lowering the switch on the electric chair. Death penalty opponents insist killing murderers does not prevent violent crime. If that’s true, why was there less crime in the 1950’s before liberal activist Supreme Court Judge Earle Warren released tens of thousands of violent criminals in America who went on heinous murder sprees which continue today?
Could God have been on to something when he said “Thou shalt not murder” because it’s wrong, and “an eye for an eye” must be dispensed to those who break laws, because justice must be enacted to “give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.”
The Connecticut Parole Board claims the Petit murder case is so shocking because it simply does not fit the mode of the two criminals who viciously murdered. The two men never raped and murdered before, according to the state of Connecticut, so why would repeated offenders suddenly decide to go on a killing spree.
Give me a freaking break; you don’t know why criminals suddenly decide to kill? Because they’re criminals and have no belief of right and wrong; they believe they can kill because life is worthless and human beings are nothing more than innate objects to use for obliging one’s means. And for the record, if someone has been arrested and imprisoned 20 times, the odds are that someone is going to up the ante the next committed crime.
The two non-human pieces of crap are Nietzsche proto-types. Everything those two men did to an innocent family was simply relative; it never actually happened unless people wish to perceive things as true. That is what Friedrich Nietzsche claimed, and that is why the world’s justice systems are so liberal—no one is doing wrong; wrong is in the eyes of the beholder; we’re all equal and must treat criminals as equal, humane beings deserving of respect we give all other; what you call deviance is wrong only to you unless of course you become the victim, then you’ll scream like a banshee for justice.
This too is how the Connecticut Parole Board views crime—its relative, just let the bastards go; they did their time; all people are fixable.
Connecticut’s justice system truly believed two freaks of Satan were rehabilitated because they spent the past year in a half-way house. How sweet. They reported to their parole officer weekly, they were nice to the parole officer, they bathed daily, combed their hair, brushed their teeth, flossed, wore deodorant, shaved, they even used hair product; they pet the neighbor’s kitty cat and waved to the Postman daily; they couldn’t possibly rape and murder horror movie-style.
If our justice system does not throw Nietzsche sociology and psychology down the toilet and replace it with God Almighty and his Ten Commandments, the violence perpetuating throughout America will continue on a downward spiral out of rejection of God and the indoctrinated religion of relativism. Without the belief and knowledge there truly is a God who holds us all accountable for right and wrong, humans will continue to look at others as illusions toward which we can do unto others as we so please.
How relatively Nietzsche.
copyright 2007 Lisa Richards
www.lisa-richards.com
E-mail contact: www.lisa-richards@lisa-richards.com