Help
Get me out of the gloom and doom. Are there any “positive developments” in the world today?
On Saturday night at the grocery store, (yes, that’s how Mommy rolls) I was in line behind a very impatient young man. When the woman ringing him up didn’t move fast enough, he huffed. When she handed him his receipt, he snatched it out of her hand and marched off. I was incensed! I stared with disbelief and sympathy at the hurt woman.
“Wow, he must be having a bad day,” I said, hoping to comfort her.
“Yeah. He’s a fa**ot!!” she said. “Somebody’s gonna get that fa**ot.”
Say what?!? I was so shocked, I nearly forgot the PIN for my debit card. I grabbed my groceries and dashed off without looking up.
Then, I come home and read this, about a traffic jam on a bridge in England. The jam was caused by the police response to a man threatening to jump. As they tried to convince him that his life was worth saving, angry and frustrated drivers screamed, “Jump, you ----er” and “Jump, you b-----.”
Alas, eventually, the man did. To his death.
Then, I read Claire’s piece in the Weekly Standard. The world’s going to pot. Right? Can someone cheer me up?
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May '10
Re: Help
Well, at least traffic got moving. Nothing ticks me off more than inconsiderate suicides. However, we can all find joy in the fact that Laurie David's global warmy book has been removed from the curriculum. If not taking joy in the fact we've had two Laurie David stories in as many weeks.
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/too_warm_for_school/
Re: Help
Ursula, if you haven't seen this, it's worth it. A very funny comedian, Louis C.K., on the old Conan O'Brien show:
May '10
Re: Help
I often reflect on the seemingly insurmountable challenge of trying to raise kind children in an unkind world. It is the small victories that keep me going, like when one of my boys (4 and 2) volunteers to share a toy with a friend or says "please" or "thank you" unprompted. We must retaliate by infecting our world with courtesy and decency as best we can. We met some friends at the playground this morning. Seeing 8 little preschoolers playing together in a sandbox all smiles and rosy cheeks was encouraging.
May '10
Re: Help
Ursula -- I thought one of the benefits of moving to the burbs was that you could avoid all that unpleasantness in the line at the grocery store. For that you could have stayed in Manhattan! You can move out here to San Francisco where we are accustomed to offering the checkout folks at Trader Joe's a hug after they make our change -- taking care of course not to cause irritation to any recent piercings or tattoos. Of course we have swarms of really surly bicyclists who will pound on your car for trying to turn right at a corner -- so maybe no better. I here tell the Turks are really polite though...
Jun '10
Re: Help
...at the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)
(from: Broken Windows, by George L. Kelling & James Q. Wilson, March 1982; http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/4465/2/ )
If there's no cost to being a selfish jerk, people will be selfish jerks. It's human nature. Part of that "jerk problem" is the high cost of legal enforcement, part is the general loss of religious faith/education, part is just the tyranny of relativism, and part of it is anonymity. There's no social cost to jerkdom anymore. Not like before, when people lived in small towns, or they lived their whole lives in a close-knit neighborhood.
May '10
Re: Help
Rob Long: Ursula, if you haven't seen this, it's worth it. A very funny comedian, Louis C.K., on the old Conan O'Brien show: · Jun 21 at 10:26am
Excellent. Thanks. Demetri Martin is another comic with generally clean and funny jokes (even if he does appear on Comedy Central).
You find what you look for, Ursula. Just keep looking for good and beautiful things and you'll find more than enough to keep you smiling.
Re: Help
The Turks are extraordinarily polite and gracious and hospitable, and there's very little street crime here. Tonight we had Turks, Americans, Moslems, Jews and Christians in our Muay Thai class, and while it would not be quite accurate to call the evening free of violence, it was certainly full of bonhomie. There's still more beauty in the world than ugliness.
I've also been greatly relieved to read that the Iranian flotilla backed down after a dozen US warships crossed the Suez Canal into the Red Sea. The Obama Administration has been disturbingly quiet about the flotilla business in public, but it seems that in private, they get the picture. Good for them. They did just the right thing.
May '10
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To what extent are guns allowed inside homes in Istanbul and, if allowed, do Turkish courts generally allow for lethal force against intruders? Giving home dwellers a free pass to blow away burglars has to be a pretty big disincentive to the sort of phenomenon you describe.
Although I seem to recall better (or at least more recent) statistics out there, here's something by Jeremy Rabkin from the Fall 2002 Public Interest:
"Studies have found that while half of all burglaries in Canada and Britain target houses where someone is at home, the comparable figure in the United States is just 13 percent."
I believe the overall level of burglaries in London is higher than in New York City, although I don't have the statistics handy. Presumably, the same reasoning accounts for the difference.
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In principle, you have to have a license to have a gun in your home. In practice, I would imagine -- given that pretty much no one does anything by the books here -- most people don't bother with that. From what I've seen, gun ownership is very prevalent. (I was surprised and a bit dismayed to see my insane former landlady run after another suspected burglar with a handgun she probably kept stashed in her porcelain cabinet. She was shrieking her head off and obviously prepared to use it, whether on him or the nearest available substitute. If ever there was an argument for strict gun control, it was her.) The law says you're not allowed to kill an intruder unless he's in your bedroom, in which case all bets are off. But as the cops said to me, "If he falls off the balcony trying to escape, well, bad things happen." Or words to that effect.