World at the end of its tether
Last Saturday, following Hartford’s West Indian Festival, shooting broke out and, in separate incidents, seven youngster were shot. Among them, a 21-year old was killed, a 7-year old shot in the head, and a 15-month old toddler was shot in the leg. Saturday was distinguished only by its concentration of the behaviors and pathologies that grind on more slowly, year after year, in Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport and any other urban sinkhole of Progressive social policy.
This time, the city of Hartford has enacted a curfew, which naturally is under legal assault from the ACLU. But that’s a natural coordinate on this map of misery, and also not the subject of this post. There is no subject of this post, just desperation. The ACLU is a freak liberal offspring of value-free rationalism. It’s too late to kill it. There could be dozens of other pests described here, too, all injecting their amoral poison into the bloodstream of the lost individuals and families snared in the web of the helping professions and that ludicrous system called “the schools”.
Hartford spends between $11000 and $17000 per student depending upon your source, and has a graduation rate of 29%. New Haven, as I recall, is higher by a few points. The figures are always misleading, because the parasitic organisms that attach themselves to school funding today always consume a huge portion of the cash available for TEACHING. On that subject, read this and this. The City of Hartford carries only about 20% of the educational financing, while the State of Connecticut provides the rest.
Among the moral absurdities of this distribution of responsibility is that the bureaucratic weight of the entire State of Connecticut is useless on the subject of school performance, and its reflection in pools of blood on asphalt. The Devil has a sense of humor, however, in that he gave us the ludicrous Nanny-figure of Governor Jodi Rell as the bug-eyed, mocking gargoyle on the ethical rubble of Connecticut’s capital city.
Rell cares so much she’s regularly heard in PSA’s on the agony of 911 operators, or the use of child safety seats, or fuming about the tragedy of pampered, upper-middle class kids killing themselves with the reckless use of high-performance automobiles. Meanwhile, the walls of civilization are crumbling around her, and her smiles, bottle-blond coif and freckles console the already dead.
Archived in: ACLU, Connecticut, Education, Liberalism, MiseryAugust 12, 2008 at 6:47 am | Trackback
11 comments
They celebrated diversity. Wasn’t it swell?
The first problem with the multi-culti mob is that they regard every “culture” as equally valid, but most of them wouldn’t live in the ways of those other “valid” cultures. They can never explain this in non-judgemental terms..which leads to problem number two:
Multiculturalism is the idiot’s reading of Ruth Benedict. None of them can distinguish culture from a way of life, so anything goes.
If it is too late to kill off the ACLU, then it is too late for the host civilization to survive; and, you are only whimpering in the corner like a cowed dog. It took several decades for the ACLU to reach this level of power. It will take decades and sustained effort to undo its influence.
I’m sorry - I thought you were talking about Detroit and Michigan there….
or Flint, Saginaw, Muskegon, Benton Harbor (Chicken Man), Lansing, Jackson, Battle Creek, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, Holland, etc, etc, etc
NJArtist:
I checked, and I’m not a cowed dog, but I recognize someone claiming to be the top dog. You. Maybe you can give us your take on how to rid ourselves of the ACLU.
The ACLU is probably not going away. While I loathe the leftist and even subversive angle of many of their activities, they don’t issue decisions, courts do. Your complaint is with the courts, not the elaborate and intricate ways in which the ACLU presents its arguments.
A similar curfew measure was declared unconstitutional here in Connecticut a while back (Manchester) and the ACLU sees a precedent.
The legal question, as far as I can determine, is the extent of the police power….not the uniformed police, but the power to promote the general welfare, and in Hartford the chaos is so wild that minors might not have the right to movement under these conditions. The ACLU might not even pursue the case, because they wouldn’t want to lose, and then have to deal with a court definition of a legal curfew.
I went to Trinity, a LIBERAL arts college in the city of Hartford, Connecticut, and graduated within the last several years.
As someone having gone to that school, it’s absolutely clear that something has to be done in that city.
In my four years there:
Three STUDENTS stabbed.
One STUDENT raped.
MY car got stolen by four 14 year old kids who proceded to total it by driving it through a forest.
My room-mate’s video game system got stolen from our room by someone going around and reaching through first-floor Dorm windows. The school put up screens after that.
Yet, despite the huge numbers of things that display just how unsafe the environment is, they refuse to even put up a wall surrounding the campus, let alone go around asking people for ID late at night.
And, of course, there’s incidents like these that happen every so often.
“New England’s Rising Star”? My ass.
John, Trinity couldn’t put a barrier between you and the savages because that would acknowledge a moral distinction between them and you. It would also represent a class barrier and privilege. The privilege is the right to be safe.
Hartford’s former Deputy Mayor (and supporter of Lieberman’s challenger, Ned Lamont), Nick Carbone, was nearly beaten to death (requiring brain surgery) in Frog Hollow in July.
New England’s Rising Star? Black hole is more accurate.
Rhod:
Did they transplant a brain with some common sense into Mr. Carbone?
Uh uh, Bryan. In the ’60’s and ’70’s Nick looked like Frankie Vallie, and had the shmoozing charm of all those urban liberal activists. In those days, style covered the rot in all their ideas, and Nick ended up in the most rotten place of all….on a gurney headed for an emergency room.
Fortunately for Carbone, they avoided leaving surgical scars by operating through his rectum, a very short distance too.