What is the absolute (fill in your favorite four letter curse)?
Eric Sondermann
We are far away, but the headlines travel and tell a scary and sickening story.
A troubled teenager is struck down as part of an accommodation that allows him to attend a public high school. On this day alone, a gun is found on him and two staff members, none of whom were allegedly trained to perform such duties, are injured. A dozen hours later, the young shooter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Two long-time employees at a west Denver restaurant are inexplicably gunned down while on duty. It was an otherwise unremarkable day at what one neighbor described as “a nice, quiet little restaurant.”
In an act of particularly brutal insanity, a particularly decent 20-year-old woman is driving, minding her own business, when she is murdered by three young suburban thugs who are apparently living a military fantasy and trying to have a stupid rock night . throwing Others in the metropolitan area escape with their lives, but are left traumatized to no end by this barbarity.
While in LoDo, a drunk fan, clearly with “issues,” loses his mind and attacks the Rockies mascot. Admittedly, the Rockies are a bad team off to a miserable start. But Dinger is not to blame. How messed up does one have to be to find violence an appropriate response against anyone? If you want to protest the team’s performance, do so by walking away from the turnstile.
I could go on. Violent acts that do not make the newspapers or lead the nightly news and leave behind anonymous victims are equally reprehensible and destructive.
Of course, escalating crime and violence is hardly confined to our fair city. You can search the news in many other urban areas and find the same rate.
But Denver and the surrounding area seem to be having a harder time lately. This is reflected not only in news content, but in polls, conversations and social media. Subscribe to Nextdoor as a barometer.
A mayoral race that would normally feature many progressive communities and a hard-left candidate among the runoff candidates has a much tougher edge and a more centrist slant.
Once again, this issue sends the loudest voices to their political poles. Tune into FOX News or most radio stations and the feeling is to close them and throw away the key. While those at home on the political left, including more than one Denver mayoral candidate knocked out in the first round, talk passionately about the “prison channel” and focus on the “root causes” of crime rather than harsher penalties.
These root causes are multiple and should not be dismissed. Babies are born innocent and arrive without the programming that some later acquire to harm others and create chaos.
But many treat these underlying conditions as an excuse rather than, at best, a partial explanation.
These causes are multiple. With notable exceptions, those who perpetrate violence and wreak such havoc do not come from economic privilege and intact, healthy, nurturing homes.
Poverty and economic distress, broken families, inept parenting, failing schools, the lingering effects of racist structures, they all are. a steeper hill that some fail to climb. None of us are without character flaws. But for too many, these deficits are magnified by the conditions of their upbringing and turn into anti-social behaviour, sometimes of an indescribable dimension.
Add to these factors a good deal of mass entertainment in which young people are marinated to accompany themselves with limited job prospects, withering dreams, growing alienation, and the thickening of much mass culture and discourse politician.
Some of these realities will be easier to repair than others. All call for attention while acknowledging that any healing has as much to do with culture as with politics.
The impact of these conditions cannot be underestimated. But neither can they be used to justify or explain in any way a behavior that violates all the legitimate norms and rules of society.
A mark of maturity is the ability to reject simplistic formulations and hold two valid thoughts simultaneously. In this case, these arguments are that the root causes matter and, at the same time, that some acts still require the harshest and most inflexible punishment.
This shouldn’t be that difficult. Actually, it should be obvious. However, many are too attached to just one of these polar positions.
In one major city after another, we are witnessing a backsliding to ultra-forgiving attitudes, including the folly of defunding the police, in addition to the horrible branding that slogan represented. No sane person argues that cops should have carte blanche or that the few bad apples in the ranks should be turned a blind eye. But this is a far cry from the direct attack on the police common in too many circles.
Likewise, while there is always room to revise sentencing ranges and guidelines, the whole notion of incarceration is frowned upon in some quarters. Talk about not being able to read the room or know the moment.
It cannot be denied that the breed has long been associated with these issues. Or that remnants of that dishonored history are still with us.
However, the real racial disparity today has less to do with arrests or jail time or even exceptional cases of police violence than with everyday victimization. If disparities are to be the focus, let’s turn the magnifying glass to the substantially increased likelihood that those of darker skin tones are victims of violent crime.
This is written while traveling abroad in the Arab world. Not so long ago, these societies may have treated stone-throwing killers in an eye-for-an-eye fashion.
Spare my editor the letters of indignation because I am not seriously proposing this for the barbarians of Jefferson County. A life sentence plus say 150 years for each of them should do the trick.
Eric Sondermann is an independent political commentator from Colorado. He writes regularly for Colorado Politics and The Gazette. It comes to him a[email protected]; follow him to @EricSondermann
