Anger Management, Civility and Crimes
On a day that should have been Annie Le’s wedding day, her disappearance was ruled a homicide. And late on Sunday, the body that was found in the medical lab she was last seen at, was confirmed as hers. Whether it is the Yale Daily News, The New Haven Independent, or the The New Haven Register, the comments to the multiple news articles about her 5 day disappearance and eventual murder simply resonate with shock and concern. Unlike say, comments about anything in Norwalk.
For example, this weekend was the Oyster festival. Having been somewhat preoccupied with work, I didn’t update this site for awhile, so I ventured through the last few days of news and discovered some startling comments. For example, on the Oyster Festival updates, some anonymous person, and I really think it’s one person, has a beef with mud, the seaport association, wine, beer, bar-b-q, and people who don’t speak english. The comments are crass and inaccurate, so I’m not going to quote them verbatim, but let me point out that if you are going to complain about people not speaking English, then perhaps you should learn how to write in proper English. Sunday night I went to the Oyster Festival, observing thousands of people, all ages, all races, all with smiles enjoying a great performance of Beatlemania! Friends who attended on other days spoke of great performances and plenty of high spirited crowds braving the drizzle and rain. Yes there was mud. And largely avoidable if you kept off the main paths that lead to the food area.
The neat thing about Norwalk is that unlike smaller towns, we don’t have just one festival a year to lay community claim to. There are dozens. You don’t have to like all of them, or any of them really. But the anger directed at the people who put them on, or attend them, who don’t fit some category of whatever, is so disrespectful. It’s great that Norwalk can host so many fairs and festivals that celebrate all sorts of different things, even if one year it means seafarin’ bar-b-q.
Meanwhile Amos Brown has left town. For some reason, even though his intended location is top-secret, the Hour ran an article on it. Brown is the father of AJ Brown who was recently acquitted of the murder of Tykwan Hunt in late May of this year. The pair is leaving Norwalk after claims of being harassed by gangs upset over the death of Hunt. The usual crime porn comments, where everything seemingly boils down to something related to fear of young people, reads like a window to an insane asylum where every paranoid schizophrenic has access to a keyboard and lays claim to the various things that are “gonna getcha.”
As the story unfolds with Le’s murder, it will likely come out that it was an obsessive lab tech who knew Le that committed the murder. Which fits in with the preponderance of evidence that most murders are committed by people who know the victim, as in 50% of the time, with only 13% identified as murder being committed by a stranger. A big 35% murder victim relationship can’t be determined, in that fungible area that perhaps relate to those “bidness” ties. But anger is the theme here, and anger is what drives homicides.
When during the US Open Serena Williams screamed obscenities at a line judge over cheesy foot fault, the line judge felt threatened, reportedly stating that Williams threatened to “kill” her. Presumably with a tennis racket, although I think the transcript says it was by shoving a tennis ball, well, you get the idea. Williams earned at least a $10k fine for the outburst, lost the match and the line judge will go on make cheesy calls. Like the snow ball throwing Giants fans, or the Congresscritter Joe Wilson who shouted “you lie” at Obama during a speech about healthcare, or the crowd at the Himes speech shouting down a Spanish Pastor, it just goes on an on. A lack of civility always in anger.
And where does this anger go? Well, for those that are fond of the gateway series of criminal activity, you know the– “if you smoke a joint you will be on the path to crack and heroin” – theory. I’d say there’s a better gateway between anger and crime. If you post negative angry words on a news site, you are just on your way to kicking the dog, beating your children and killing your spouse. Kinda makes you think. But on an upbeat, here’s to what we all have in common.
