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Politicians And The Memory Hole


“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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