News from the Plains: All this RED can make you BLUE
Why some should never be allowed to write again
by Barry Friedman
This is no longer the worst writing to come out of Oklahoma this year.
This is.
It's hard for the community to be concerned about the number of homicides when it's gang members killing gang members. When you think about it, who's really complaining about that?
Palm meet forehead; forehead meet computer monitor.
Anyway, that's Terry Simonson, a writer for Urban Tulsa Weekly (full disclosure: I used to write there) and former chief of staff for Tulsa Mayor Dewey Bartlett, waxing as un-poetically as anyone has ever waxed about anything--much less a city's homicide rate and who shouldn't be counted in the statistics.
In his alleged mind, not all dead bodies strewn about town should be treated the same.
An overview of the homicides so far in 2013 shows that the killings resulting from drug deals going bad account for eight of the killings, 18 were a result of altercations (many of which involved alcohol), and nearly 10 of the killings were tied to either robberies or were gang related.
Simonson admits some of these vermin will actually be missed--not by anyone important, mind you--but still believes their deaths should be viewed the way the University of Tulsa Golden Hurricane would look at an out-of-conference defeat.
Those deaths are certainly a loss to the families of the fallen gang member, but is it actually a loss to the community?
And just when you thought his black-hearted douchebaggery couldn't get worse, it does.
Wiping out gangs is, after all, the focus of local law enforcement, and they can use all the help they can get.
Of course they can. And it's just what a city yearns for. Armed gangs settling disputes with other armed gangs. And what could possibly go wrong? I mean, unless you're the bystander at a fruit stand who gets clipped in a Blood/Crip border war or happen to don the wrong color hoodie on the way to school, it's a win-win-win.
It sounds like good public safety work being done for the police by the gangs.
Right. They're just community watchdog groups and, okay, so they have semi-automatic weapons and no respect for the rule of law--let's not split hairs. But why stop there? Maybe we can have these marauding bands of evil also help the police by providing crowd control at concerts and street fairs and by teaching kids traffic safety rules at school crossings.
If the gangs want to kill each other, we certainly don't want to stop them. This is a callous, but true, assessment of the situation.
Computer monitor, meet sidewalk below.
"Callous," Terry? No, it's soulless.
Urban Tulsa Weekly