No Going Back!
Is the Economy A Motive for Murder and Crime?
If you’ve watched the news lately, you have to wonder what is going on. There has been a lot of murdering going on in March 2009, and lots of crime has been going on with while this economic down turn has been kicking our collective tails. Since the other big news of 2009 is a down dipping economy, well, it is just human when you see dots, you connect the dots.
DOT=> Consider the incident in Belle Valley , Ohio where a man called a sheriff’s dispatcher and said he was having money troubles and so he had strangled his wife and 11 year old son. The money troubled man, Theodore Bayly, age 39, called the dispatcher around 2 a.m. , explained his motive, described where to go to find the bodies and hung up. It was a murder suicide situation, and the wacky guy said he did what he did because of the economy. Was it the economy, or was he just a mean crazy jerk?
DOT=> The Alabama rampage is similar, although we don’t have the killer blaming the economy, he did have a list of people who had “done him wrong.” While the people killed were not on the “done wrong” list, it still implies, I guess, that Mr. McLendon was angry, and lashing out because he felt victimized, and all this seemed to trigger this killing spree. Michael McLendon killed his mother, grandmother, uncle, two cousins, and five other people, including an 18 month old girl, who were in the wrong place.
DOT=> The incident where a guy walked into a church and gunned down the preacher, well, according to the family of the killer, that suspect was mentally ill because of a tick bite. Was it a really bad tick bite, the economy, or was he just a mean crazy jerk?
DOT=> How about Tim Kretschmer, the 17-year-old assailant, in Germany , had posted a warning on an Internet chat site just six hours before the shooting started Wednesday in the school at Winnenden. The killer said, " I have weapons and will go to my old school and really burn them up, " Kretschmer wrote. " I might get out alive, but you will certainly hear about me tomorrow. Remember the name Winnenden. " Was this German teenager crazy, a victim of the world wide great recession, or just a mean kid?
DOT=> Today, in court Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty and said, " I am deeply sorry and ashamed. " Madoff admitted that the did create a Ponzi scheme and, in a blame shifting effort explained that this Ponzi scheme began in the early 1990's in response to a recession and stated: " When I began the Ponzi scheme I believed it would end shortly and I would be able to extricate myself and my clients from the scheme. "
Should we be surprised that crime would be linked to hard times, and personal stress? While there are exceptions, most folks who have everything they want don’t think about knocking over a convenience store.
There can be no peace in the world so long as a large proportion of the population lack the necessities of life and believe that a change of the political and economic system will make them available. World peace must be based on world plenty. ~John B Orr
Federal statistics show that from 1979 to 1997, wages for men without a college education, fell by 20 percent. In 1993, wages for men without a college education increased by 35 percent and during the same period there was a statistically slight decline in crime.
So is our economy the cause of these recent murders and property crimes, and Ponzi schemes? The truth is that we can’t know for sure when a crime is caused by the economy and when it is caused by some other factor. When we see the news and make wide sweeping statements we are viewing the world through the eye of a needle. There is a micro view, the small, tiny, closely focused view, and the macro view, the big picture, the broad view. To see anything clearly we need both. We look at the isolated incidents, and then we look at the statistical patterns. Micro and Macro become checks and balances on one another.
Not failure, but low aim, is crime. ~James Russell Lowell
I don’t know if the killings this week or the crime over the past 12 months can be blamed on our economy, but when I connect the dots I do see the picture. What I do believe is that to redress crime, and to focus the populous we have to aim high and not low. We need to be bold. We need to do something. No economic bad period has lasted forever, and this Great Recession won’t either. I for one believe that Obama has a plan, and it makes sense.
Article submitted Thursday, March 12, 2009 & read 10691 times.
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