Category — Misery

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.