As I poked through the online papers this morning, one theme seemed to jump out at me: babies. Babies were getting involved in all sorts of stories, and it seems that whenever a story involves a baby, it’s usually bad news.
In Erie, Pennsylvania, a couple was arguing. The woman got so mad at her boyfriend that she, in a blind fury, picked up the nearest object and hit him with it. Unfortunately, the object was their 4-week-old infant. The mother’s in jail and the boy is in serious but stable condition.
Last Saturday in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, a birthday party was disrupted by an ejected crasher. As a way of showing that he should have been allowed to stay, he shot up the gathering. One man was killed — right in front of his fiance’ and their almost-two-year-old son — who had to flee while the father took the bullet that could have killed either — or both — of them.
And over in the Roslindale neighborhood of Boston, a baby boy is slowly struggling back to health after being abandoned in a vacant lot. The newborn — named “Jordan” by state officials — was found after he had been abandoned overnight while wrapped in a black garbage bag and with a towel around his head. His umbilical cord and placenta were still attached.
The most infuriating aspect of the whole story is that Massachusetts has a “safe haven” law. The mother of the newborn could have walked into any police station, fire station, or hospital and simply said “here, I don’t want him” and walked out unchallenged. The law was passed to prevent this sort of atrocity, which is becoming all too common.
Some day, I’d like to see a story in the news about a baby that wasn’t tragic or outrageous. But I’m starting to learn that “child,” “infant,” “toddler,” and “newborn” in a headline are usually bad omens.
What’s the big deal? This country slaughters 1,000,000+ in the womb each year and not enough people bat an eye. Now they’re expanding the killing zone to a few weeks outside of the womb. What’s the difference?
A few days before, the Roslindale child could have been pulled three quarters of the way out of the womb, had a pair a scissors jabbed into the base of his skull, and then had his brain vacuumed out and too many in this country would be okay with it. When the Left worships at the altar of abortion, this is what they reap.
That’s why I rarely listen to the news anymore. If I hear one of these stories come up on the radio, I usually turn down the volume for a few seconds or find a music station.
Stories of babies and kids getting hurt didn’t affect me nearly as much before I became a father. Now with two beautiful little girls, I get physically ill when I hear about crap like that.
And as the middle class gets squeezed and more and more people sink into poverty and bankruptcy due to neocon policies that decrease the working mans buying power only to enrich the already wealthy even more and neocon policies that decrease the chance for upward mobility or going to college diminishes….expect more of the same……oh yeah and as family planning and access to it diminish…expect more of the same…..this is the way you all want the country to go so when you look for some one to blame look in the mirror.
But it doesn’t matter to the wealthy class they don’t know what a carton of milk cost they only need enough of you rabble to keep believing in them and voting them into office.
And yes each of these cases has an individual person to fault…but the big picture blame goes to the knuckle heads who vote for these policies. You bastards that are so worried about abortion but don’t give a crap about the child once they are born. As long as the child doesn’t get aborted you don’t care that these policies make it more likely he gets his head bashed into a wall. As long as the day after pill isn’t easily available you don’t care about shanty towns popping up in your own nation. As long as abortion is illegal as in Mexico you don’t care that the rest of our country will also look and be run like Mexico as well.
Why don’t you let God judge abortion on each of our own judgement days and start worrying about the poor as the good book says you should….once again….HYPOCRITS!!
muirgeo:
Perhaps you could enlighten us, as to just what we could do to improve the lives of the poor. After forty years of the great society, I’m wondering what went wrong?
So is Muriego, Thats why He/Shes so angry.
JayTea,
I blog, and also have a side email group of perhaps 60 plus from a central Illinois high school with classes from 1958 thru 1964 or so.
One of the threads in our email group has been one member’s posts on his granddaughter’s trek from deaf-by-birth problem, thru implants and the re-birth of the child as a hearing person. Is has been a warm, tender and heartening story for those of us involved. Perhaps we only get the usual MSM pablum of “death/injury/problems” as opposed to the good news available if any cared to follow it.
Duke of DeLand
Another tragedy involving a welfare mom taking her baby clubbing. Sad. Very sad.
I have to say I agree with Muriego. Shanty towns are popping up all over the place. Why, just the other day, I say a pathetic shanty town full of very depressed and oppressed people. Oh, wait a minute, that was just Cindy Sheehan. Damn neocons!
So muirgeo, we should ignore one part of the good book (you know, about not killing) in favor of another? You justify killing because people are poor? Don’t you think there might be a BETTER solution to poverty? Nah… let’s kill babies and give more of our hard-earned wages to people who are too lazy to work. And mark my words, a large portion of people who are poor and on welfare are people who just can’t be bothered to work. I know a large number of people on welfare, and only TWO actually need it (one is disabled and the other is a single mother who is working her butt off to put herself through school so she can get OFF welfare.) The others? They stay up all night playing X-Box on their 27″ TVs, buy Southern Comfort and weed, and milk the system and take all they can get (housing, food stamps, heating assistance, free child care, etc), and DON’T WORK. Don’t use that as justification for abortion.
“Shanty Towns”? I thought those only existed where the Clinton library now stands?
See, theres always a way to work Clinton into every story.
The pressure on working-class American families are increasing all the time. The lower income groups are not benefiting from capital gains tax cuts, or the huge amounts being spent on defense.
Sadly, these Amerians aren’t a priority these days.
We need to do better. These are hard-working Americans with children.
If it’s in a headline, then it’s bad news. Newspapers don’t even try to highlight the good anymore.
Lee:
Please read my response to “muirgeo”. I offer you the same question.
BTW, this is the year 2006.
Lee & Muirego,
Although I doubt you’d ever be able to accept it, as it would cause your whole secular-socialist worldview to come crashing down around you, the LEFT created the problems you are now complaining about, not the “evil neo-cons”. I am reminded of this every day as I work in social services and get to see the unintended consequences of the “great society” all the time. You most likely will never be able to believe this belonging to the imaginary-reality-based community, but most of the readers on this blog do understand the unintentional but extreme harm the left has caused to the poor and need.
I’d suggest reading Theodore Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass and Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses
Another excellent read is The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass by Myron Magnet.
Even though I seriously doubt you two secular socialists would be able to read those books without becoming catatonic, maybe if you did and if you just tried to think a little bit for a change, maybe, just maybe you’d stop posting such utter bullshit on this blog.
BTW Lee,
Thanks for reminding everyone of the dire straits in which the poor were left due to President Clinton’s roaring 20’s style economy followed by Clinton’s major recession (that started in 2000).
And lets also not forget what the “neocons” have done recently: historically low unemployment, record high minority homeowner ownership, and the first reductions in the number of welfare recipients since the inception of the left’s “great society”.
The quoted article states that the poor faired better under Clinton, and things have worsened under Bush — and now we’re told it’s Carter’s fault?
Morons. Address the facts or shut up – but by all means quit lying and ducking responsibility.
Are You calling Monica Lewinsky poor dodo brain?
Wise up.
Lee,
You don’t seem very bright to me, so I’ll try to explain this in as simple terms as possible. It takes years for the the effects of an administratin’s policies to be felt.
Regan & Bush left Clinton with a very healthy economy. Add the dot.com bubble and the Y2K bubble and the economy did well in the 90’s. Unfortuately, Clinton’s mismanagement & secular socialist policies left the economy in shambles as things started to go bad during the last year of his presidency.
It took several years for Bush to fix all the damage that Clinton did but we very obviuosly recovering and dispite the misreopting by the “MSM” things are a lot better today for the poor and middle class. We’ll just have to wait and see what the poverty number look like in ’08, but the very old data you posted was a result of the Clinton years, and had nothing to do with Bush.
“and now we’re told it’s Carter’s fault”
Who said it was Carter’s fault?
I’m not saying he didn’t cause extreme suffering and hardship amongst the poor and middle class (which he clearly did), but I believe you’re the first to bring him up on this thread.
USMC Pilot: “Perhaps you could enlighten us, as to just what we could do to improve the lives of the poor. After forty years of the great society, I’m wondering what went wrong?”
Still wondering, after 40 years? It’s simple, USMC Pilot, as soon as enough Republicans gather in one place they start finding ways to shift priorities away from the average American, and move things in favor of the rich, the oil companies, the lobbyist, and lining their own damn pockets.
We need to reset our priorties, but I’m not going to dictate how that should be done – it should be done with a dialog among all Americans – not just those that favor the wealthy.
Cleaning house, and prying the Republicans’ cold, bloodless hands from the reins of power in this country, is the first step.
Once that’s done we can start talking about possible solutions.
People, talking and working together, is the answer, USMC Pilot. There is no easy solution, just easy ways to hide your eyes and pretend the problems don’t exist.
Sure, socio-economic consequences can take some time to manifest, and some cases can rear their ugly head more than a decade later.
Here, however, I think people are forgetting that we suffered through two domestic catastrophies in Bush’s presidency…Katrina and 911, neither of which can be blamed on him.
We’ve also gone to war (a war some say for oil, even though oil is now more expensive.)
These facts should be taken into account (not used as a sole reason) when one wonders why there is an increase of poor people in our country.
To echo Lee, pressure is increasing on working class families. Some of this could be relieved with some rearranging of priorities.
I’d be interested to check if there is a breakdown of regions with the most poor, and if in any way illegal aliens or poor immigrants are being taken into account.
muirgeo and Lee use the democratic talking points as an argument. I don’t see the encrease in poverty with a 4.7% unemployment rate and the greatest (percentage) increase in home ownership in history. The middle class that disappeared didn’t go down to poor, they “moved up” into another income class. Anyone that wants a job has one and some that didn’t want one, been on the welfare tit for 40 years, were forced to go to work. Democrats see every container as half empty. No life other than bitterness. Do we have to wonder who all of the child abusers and killers are? Bitter, po ole me, democrats by a 99 to 1 margin. Didn’t I see another young boy up playing and learning today that was in a vegetative state for years. Good thing the democrats didn’t get hold of him. The would, as is their habit, have starved him to death simply to save a dollar for another glass of whine.
I would hate to live around the bitterness of the ,po ole me, democrats on the blogs. Actually people around here wouldn’t listen to them, they would slab them around the side of the head to get their attention and point out how good the American people have it. The democrats would be happy to lead the country down ,again, until we were digging for roots to eat like the ‘people’ of North Korea. The 90% was all phony hype, the country almost fell through the cracks when the ‘criminals’ were removed from the government and big business. I still want to know where the billions of dollars worth of ‘military’ equipment went when the Klington’s destroyed the military. Over 40% reduction in troops yet we were left without a supply of even small arms ammo.
.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I always figured if you couldn’t afford to have children, then maybe you shouldn’t get pregnant. Perhaps that entails, oh, not having sex. God forbid people deny themselves instant gratification!
It’s not that difficult of a concept. Instead of having an abortion because you don’t want/can’t afford a child, don’t get pregnant in the first place. Preventative maintainence is always more effective than fixing the problem when the problem becomes unavoidable. For those of you who find a “no sex” policy absolutely repugnant, condoms are free in a lot of health clinics and social service offices. It’s not difficult to find contraceptives anymore.
People who have tons of kids when they cannot afford them and then wonder why they are poor do not deserve the forcible acquisition of my money to bail them out of their mess, nor do they have the right to “fix” their problems by eliminating the child.
Perhaps I’ve gone a bit off topic…
Actually SilverBubble, you’ve headed back on topic, at least a lot more than we were.
I have to congratulate Lee on his semi-successful highjacking of another thread. We almost got completely off the topic of genocide, with which Lee has to be at least a little unconfortable, seeing as he/she is FOR it. Of course a secular socialist would never call killing 2,700+ inconvenient humans a day genocide, that would be a little too honest. That would be a reality the “reality-based” community refuses to acknoledge. Instead, they call it “choice”.
It must be hard being a “democrat” and knowing that support and approve of mass murder on the scale of 9/11 every single day.
Lee:
Just in case you stumble back to this thread. Ben & Jerry need to stick to making ice cream. Their economics sucks. They want to slash 10% of the military budget, while the USA is responsible for policing the world (why the hell I have no idea). What ever happened to “lack of training”, “no body armour”, “armoured HumVees”, “too short rotation periods”? I thought you said “possible solution”, not idiot ideas.