A real cryin’ shame
Banita Jacks murdered her four daughters and their decomposing bodies were found this last week in the Northeast DC house in which the family had been “squatting”. It’s a crying shame, a REAL crying shame. How can you avoid moist eyes when you think about a mother murdering FOUR daughters in this day and age? And yes, it’s the mother’s fault completely, I’m not making excuses for her – like DC Mayor Adrian Fenty made excuses for city government yesterday (Washington Examiner link);
Fenty, sweating under a battery of television lights, ticked off the long list of the family’s encounters with city bureaucrats and promised that he wouldn’t let any other distressed families fade into filing-cabinet obscurity.
The family’s first known contact with D.C. officialdom came in early December 2005, when Jacks applied for housing assistance. The family would check into a shelter barely a week later, and the daughters enrolled in city schools in early 2006.
Over the course of about 13 months, the family would have 32 encounters with city bureaucrats, Fenty admitted Friday. The encounters ranged from the banal – as on Nov. 30, 2006, when the family lost its food stamps because it hadn’t filled out the paperwork properly – to the ominous, as on April 30, 2007, when a school social worker told police she was worried Jacks was holding her oldest daughter, Brittany, “hostage” by refusing her to go back to class.
So who am I blaming besides the mother? Not the government – what good would it do? The government can’t be sued for not doing their job, so we don’t really hold them accountable. Yeah, generally, we blame some government entity for our problems, but who is the government? Well, we are.
I heard some dingus at yesterday’s Gitmo rally say that we, the People, are the Fourth Branch of government. What horseshit. To make the People a 4th Branch is a demotion. The government works for us and they only have the power we give them – and we’ve given them the power to care for our families and care for our ill. We pay taxes so they do it. And we know they’ll do a sorry job of it, too – but we need a scapegoat. Government is inherently incompetent, and we expect it, just so long as we have someone to blame for being incompetent we’re willing to accept it.
New Orleans and the Katrina incident should have taught us how incompetent is government at every level. We should have learned that no matter how much money we pay, government can’t do their job. No matter how much they regulate our neighbors, no matter how much they invade our privacy, they suck. But every time they screw up we act surprised at how bad they suck. The more we delegate to the government, the worse they get – but we still give them more to screw up.
So it’s our fault. Period. Yes, the government has things it should do. Defense, roads and stuff like that which isn’t profitable for the private industry. But our healthcare? Our social security? Caring for the less fortunate? They can’t even move a 3 ounce letter from coast-to-coast reliably, why should I let them care for my retarded adult child?
We have no to blame for this injury to our society except the perpetrator and ourselves. Ourselves for delegating our responsibility to healing our own ills to an incompetent government.
