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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