“One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic” -- Joseph Stalin
The memory hole is deepening to such a point that Democrats,
especially mayors-for-life who have been in charge of major cities for about a
half century, are having difficulty in remembering yesterday.
It seems only yesterday that Randell Tarez Jones, a three year
old child, was gunned down in Hartford by a 19 year old who hadn’t bothered to attend
closely to the imprecations of U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy
on the dangers of “assault weapons.”
Here’s betting that the 19 year old did not purchase his
weapon at a gun show, nor did the weapon fire itself. The shooter fired it inadvertently,
the media helpfully reported, killing the 3 year old, the wrong target.
The shooter’s intended target was a man sitting in the
passenger seat who, once the firing had started, managed to dive out the
driver’s window, scurrying over the driver, a mother of three children, all
present and accounted for in the car. When the bullets, likely not purchased by
the shooter at a gun show, stopped flying, the three year old child, driven to
the hospital by the mother, expired.
This writer predicted at the time that it would take
politicians who turned up to commiserate with stricken family members –
Blumenthal, known to show up, as he said, “at garage door openings,” appeared
to be absent without a by-your-leave -- only a few hours to forget the child’s
name: “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 said,
‘It’s always been kind of a thing, especially when the weather starts to warm
up. It’s kind of expected.’”
Rain on Wednesday, sunshine on Thursday, murders happen. Such
untidy murders are expected in Connecticut’s large cities, but not, say, in
Greenwich, Connecticut, home to taxable millionaires.
Why are murders expected in Hartford, even among the potential
victims of murder, but not in Greenwich, where the streets are, euphemistically
speaking, paved with gold? More importantly, what are politicians in the
General Assembly prepared to do to reduce expected murders in Connecticut’s
large cities now that Coronavirus, a too convenient scaffold upon which our moral
indifference hangs, appears to be hobbling off the front pages of Connecticut’s
press?
Why is a single death in Greenwich a tragedy, while a single
death in Hartford is a statistic?
It cannot be so because there is no one to mourn the victim.
Hartford is crowded with mourners. Attending a religious service in the north
end of Hartford, one bumps into victims of crime everywhere. A recent story in a Hartford
paper unscrolled the statistics. People who tend to nod off when statistics are
displayed before them need go no further than the story’s headline: “Hartford
is on pace for one of its deadliest years in decades, with 20 murders halfway
through 2021 as violent crime rises nationwide.”
We are prepared to forget that there has been a murder,
there has been a victim, there has been a crime, even before the crime has been
committed, before the body is buried, before the criminal is apprehended,
before he is charged, before he is convicted, before he is sentenced, because –
such things are to be expected, so long as we do not wish to attack, or even
discuss, the causes of post-fatherless urban crime.
And when we are slapped in the face by the murder of a three
year old child, still we do not awaken. We add the child to a growing list of
statistics. We resume our daily lives, hoping for a better tomorrow. We tell
ourselves, if we are politicians, there is “still much work to be done,” the
clear implication being that all the wounds will close of themselves, that one
day, magically, murders – which crop up in cities mysteriously, like mushrooms
after a moist morning -- will of themselves disappear. Why bestir ourselves? We
need do nothing but wait patiently for the anarchy in our cities to disappear;
maybe sprinkle the blood in the streets with more
money or, better, douse the anarchic flames in 19 year old African
American boys, many of them fatherless, with copious tears of compassion.
In fact, the anarchy in our cities – not to worry too much;
crime everywhere in our tragic, post-modern world is on the uptick -- is the third
rail of Connecticut politics. We are more comfortable with statistics than murders
in our cities because, as Joseph Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy; one million
is a statistic.”
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