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Wasted Crises


President Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel famously said in 2008, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. I mean, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

And, supposing there is no obvious crisis, it is always possible for an inventive politician to spin one from his or her teeming imagination. The more horrific the imagined crisis, the greater the opportunity to do things that could not be done before it had been loosed upon the world.

The corollary to this piece of stupidity involves ignoring serious crises, easily done if you can call upon a subservient media to bury them.

Much of the media is anxious to do business with the prevailing power and, for this reason, too few in the media are contrarians. To find a vigorous American contrarian, we have to go all the way back to Mark Twain, who said politicians were like babies: both politicians and babies soil their diapers often, which have to be changed as often, “and for the same reasons.” H. L. Mencken was also a contrarian: “A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”

Connecticut’s media has been unfailingly supportive of the progressive status quo, the honest burglars. There are few quality contrarians serving on editorial boards across the state. And it is worse than that perhaps. Editorial boards and newspapers themselves, deprived of their sting, are disappearing.

Large Democrat controlled cities in Connecticut have been in crisis for the last half century, but we have gotten so used to urban crises that we hardly notice them at all. Urban earthquakes do not register for long on our emotional seismographs. They are invisible, like Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.”

The murder in Hartford of a 3 year old child in a drive by shooting is worth little more than a half page of print and, in some cases, the memory of the murder will last no longer than the burial of the child. In our post-Coronavirus culture, public funerals are yet outlawed, but the real outlaws – the drug gangs, rootless pre-teens and teens, roving bands of sympathetic politicians weeping blood from their eyes and searching for media opportunities – have not been outlawed.

Just the opposite. Connecticut’s politicians and courts no longer believe in the efficacy of punishment. Connecticut's Supreme Court abolished the state’s death penalty a few years back because, the court said, severe punishments of this kind no longer deterred heinous murderers when, in fact, the court knew, or ought to have known, that a punishment infinitely delayed has no deterrent power at all. The court also said it detected a change within the general population that favored the replacement of capital punishment with life terms in prison for capital offenders. Both were dubious supposals.

Following yet another murder in the state’s Capital city – and it was a murderer, not an illegally acquired assault weapon, that took the life of 3 year-old Randell Tarez Jones -- little has changed. People who have lived for years in shoot-em-up sections of Hartford have long been overcome by confusion and emotional nihilism.

A 29 year-old woman, walking her dog a few blocks from the murder scene, was asked by a reporter to comment. “I was raised in this neighborhood,” she says, “It’s always been kind of a thing, especially when the weather starts to warm up. It’s kind of expected.”

The reporter interviewed a second person who has lived for 34 years in a neighborhood where another murder -- committed minutes apart from the first and likely connected to it, police now say – occurred some few blocks from the spot where baby Jones was fatally shot.

The 66 year-old women was having a problem making sense of it all. The shooters, she said, “don’t care these are kids who are trying to grow up to be somebody. It’s like – let them live.”

A former street minister in Hartford, now a facilities worker for the Capitol Region Education Council, told the reporter, “The question is why? Why is it the younger generation that’s turned around? Babies don’t even have a chance at life. Sixteen year olds don’t even know anything about life, street life. It’s too much.”

“The violence isn’t contained in a few dangerous areas,” the former street minister told the reporter, “It’s all over the city.”

These are the whispered voices that rarely penetrate the stone walls of the Capitol building in Hartford. Whispers in the whirlwind they are, crushed under an intolerable weight of resignation.

There is no muscle behind the Pharisaical tears of politicians in Hartford. They cannot produce a single real solution that does not alienate one or another partisan hog rooting in the state's Orwellian political barnyard.

Welfare can never be more that a temporary salve, not a permanent solution. Hartford needs free market jobs, not make work political handouts. It needs sufficiently financed school choice, a voucher system that will empower parents to throw off the incubus of a highly regulated over-indulged public school system that seems incapable of teaching a student to read, write and figure before he or she is handed off to colleges ill prepared to provide functional illiterates with a dumbed down fourth grade education. It needs fathers to police the precincts of sound families. And in absence of loving, hardworking fathers, Harford will need more neighborhood police to apprehend and send to prison shooters who murder 3 year-old children, in addition to a functioning court system that prizes the inestimable value of just punishment.


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