Today was car maintenance day for me, so I missed the afternoon headlines. I see that there has been another school shooting. Five more people got shot in Philly on Monday and early Tuesday morning. Everyone freaks out about the former, but hardly anyone cares about the latter. I understand that it’s harder to take when kids get shot, but they sometimes get shot in places other than school.
Early Tuesday morning, a 17-year-old was reported in stable condition after he was shot in the leg on East Atlantic Street in Harrowgate.
See?
It’s a big problem no matter where it happens.
I’m hoping Joey Biden is ready to kick some ass.
Hunting Park is a really dangerous area. I’m really beginning to hate Philadelphia. And Pennsylvania in general.
Why? Re: your 2nd and 3rd sentences.
Sentence two: I am throughly tired of being worried I’m going to wind up shot. Teenagers shooting at each other on the El and the Broad Street Line. The constant echo of pop-pop-pop in my neighborhood. Last summer’s shooting on the basketball court ACROSS THE STREET FROM MY HOUSE, witnessed by 200 people who “didn’t see anything”. A city in which more than 50% of the adults read at or below the 5th grade level. A mayor whose response to a fiscal crisis is to shut libraries and rec centers. I’m tired of the in-your-face anger, deliberate disrespect, and plain old hopelessness. And yeah, there’s good stuff here. But I’m fucking sick of the rest of it.
Sentence two: many of the problems in our fair city can be laid at the feet of the racist motherfuckers in harrisburg who wish Philadelphia would disappear in a cloud of smoke. So yes, i am sick of the state as well.
case in point: argument over a cell phone.
what’s not to hate about this daily occurrence?
Good time to remind folks that in despite a nomination for an ATF head, the GOP/NRA has been able to block confirmation…for 7 years.
Time for a recess appointment.
Biden is made for this kind of fight. He can cover Obama on one front and go after the gun lobbies on another. He doesn’t care what people say about him and he can dig in for as long as it takes. I am a big fan of Old Handsome Joe and I hope he can make some progress in this crazy battle.
The issue isn’t going away. There are enough voices crying out for change, and the gun lovers are starting to feel the pinch. Let’s not quit now, while we have a toehold.
Koey Boy, eh?
The erstwhile Senator from MBNA?
The champion anti-drug warrior?
read on.
Joe Biden.
My kinda guy.
Not.
Your kinda guy, though.
And welcome to him.
AG
Huh. Singing a different tune I see:
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/10/2/185522/943#5
I wouldn’t call Biden corrupt, but yes, he is a drug and copyright warrior.
Only as “corrupt” as the rest of the PermaGov. Charming? Clever? Someone to have a beer with and tell some jokes? Hail fellow well met? A better hang than say Dick Cheney or Richard Nixon? Of course. Yes. But a moral or cultural hero? Someone with foresight? A deep thinker as far as the problems of the culture and nation are concerned? I think not.
Sorry, but there it is.
In a national government almost entirely populated by power-mad fools, stiffs and nasty corporate hustlers, Biden stands out by having maintained some line-level sense of humanity. But fight the good fight? Only if it’s politically expedient.
Bet on it.
So it goes.
AG
He wasn’t called “The Senator from MBNA” for nothing.
I live a few blocks from the Taft school shooting. The kid who did the shooting had specific person in mind. Apparently he’s been bullied for a long long time(years)with nothing done about it even though parents have tried to get the school to do something. Lot of other rumors out there that all the local kids and young adults like my nephew are talking about having to do with this kid being bullied.
Also of course people saying this is a nice little town, etc and so on. I don’t know about nice, it’s an incredibly racist(still have KKK here)redneck town. Don’t want to put any other rumors out there but most of the ‘rumors’ I heard earlier have been confirmed.
You raise a good point about bullying.
It seems like there has been a lot of talk today on Balloon Juice about all the people above Bradley Manning’s pay grade in the military who failed him because they surely saw that something was not right and did not take any action. Those people should be held accountable, too.
The same thing is true of adults who turn a blind eye to bullying because it’s just “boys will be boys” or they think it’s not a big deal. Those folks should be held accountable, too.
The same thing is true with pedophile priests in the catholic church, with pedophiles in the boy scouts, with pedophiles at penn state. All those folks in the church and the boy scouts and penn state and second mile who turned a blind eye should be held accountable, too.
So why does it seem that accountability is only for the little guy and rarely for the people with power?
I started a reply to this comment and it grew.
Now a stand-alone post.
“Accountability?” It Depends On Who Handles The Accounts.
Later…
AG
I read your post.
You’re right, the answer to my question as written is obvious. Why does it seem like accountability is only for the little guy? It seems like that because IT IS like that.
What I was really attempting to do is share my frustration at the fact that it seems to be acceptable for it to be that way. Why aren’t we all rioting in the streets with outrage over all the things that are so wrong?
I was in Boston a few years ago at some little museum related to the founding of our country. I would read the quotes from our founders and think how radical it would sound today, and how incredibly wonderful it is that our country was founded on all those populist beliefs.
I can only imagine that our founders are now shaking their heads at us in disbelief, if not rolling over in their graves.
The simplest answer? (Although not by a long shot the most fashionable one, especially on leftiness websites.)
Because we are always outnumbered and always outgunned.
Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned. Walter Moseley’s brilliant novel ostensibly about Socrates Fortlow, a black ex-con in the segregated LA of the ’50s.
But really? About us all.
I just watched another episode of Oliver Stone’s equally brilliant series on SHO, The Untold History of the United States. Truth after truth presently in a supposed “bold” manner by the cable network SHO, which is owned by the same PermaGov media complex that owns the rest of the mainstream media. YOU know, the one that claims “freedom of speech for everyone” and then uses presentations like Stone’s series to prove its point even though that set of viewpoints is decisively “outnumbered and outgunned” by the other 99.9% of the media that does not present the various truth(s) of the matters(s) at hand.
Remember the media runup to the Iraq War for all you need to know on this tactic.
“Fair and balanced” reporting. Seventeen crisply well-dressed PermaGov functionaries agreeing that what we have to do is to go get Iraq for the 9/11 attack balanced out by a couple of frowzy nuns and a somewhat confused-seeming older liberal in a sagging old tweed jacket and a cloud of pipe smoke saying “Well…are you sure this is what Christ would have recommended?”
Please.
Send in the clowns.
And wake the fuck up.
AG
What I’m hearing from kids around town is that this kid has been bullied for years. The school’s answer to his parents was to tell them to go to another high school in a smaller town few miles away.
I didn’t know we had armed guard at this small school. It’s about 900 high school kids and only high school here. Except the guard wasn’t here because he’d been snowed in and couldn’t get to the school.