Jay Cronley: Infighting is murder around here
BY JAY CRONLEY World Staff Columnist
Friday, September 30, 2011
9/30/11 at 3:37 AM
Our city government officials are very good at one thing in particular: Fighting with each another.
That makes life better for the editorial staff here. Let's see, which cartoon character has been acting up overnight?
If the editorial offices have been shut down about 1 p.m., you have to figure that the city officials have been at it again.
The ability to fight is often a campaign promise.
Lost in the translation is direction.
Counting bodies: Turn the fight outward.
Here's something worth fighting: crime, specifically murder.
It happens so often that it has come to be a part of the daily ritual, updating the body count on the pages of newspapers and on the nightly television news.
There are cable television channels showing real-life murder stories around the clock - fancy people, poor people, scholars and idiots, neither the Commandment nor the law serving as a deterrent to love or money as motives.
Nine times out of 10, the spouse does it - no body, no foul, some plan, that.
Only a relative or a shrink or a neighbor might stop a domestic crime.
Murder is only slightly easier to prevent in or on the street.
There are always jobs. Where legal jobs are unavailable, illegal jobs are found. A person has to do something. Sometimes all there is to do is sell drugs and participate in shootouts.
No. 1 with a bullet: True, you can't put a cop on every corner.
But nothing would seem to be more important on a city's landscape than blue space, more police. Forget trees for the time being. Up with cops.
Society is so overpopulated with crooks and underpopulated with police that some violations of the law are handled like slick streets - for casual crimes, fill out a form, please. Must you take a number to get in line to report a meth lab?
City parks are not for killing.
Neighborhood streets are no place for revenge.
Yesterday I stopped at a light behind a new-model car with seven bullet holes in back, four in the fender, two in the trunk and one through the back window, close to being in line with the driver.
The bullet holes had been filled in and needed to be painted.
It makes a person check the rear-view mirror now and again.
Original Print Headline: Infightingis murder around here
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