The Little House of Horrors in Chardon, Ohio.
02 Mar 2012 4 Comments
Like most people this past Monday I was terribly saddened by the shooting at Chardon High School, outside Cleaveland, Ohio. The knee jerk reaction of the public, and media was that it must have been caused by bullying. The alleged perpetrator, Thomas “T.J.” Lane, appeared to be a small and frail, actually emaciated teenager with a vulnerable bearing who might easily be targeted by more robust and self-confident students. I never saw or heard anything of his parents or siblings.
The more I saw of him in police custody videos and photos posted on news programs the more I was struck by how extremely emaciated, pale and gaunt he appeared and how little affect his facial expression showed. As the weekdays passed, the talk of bullying faded away, leaving a void of silence. One by one others of the victims died. We waited to hear some hint, some detail that would answer the question “Why?” but nothing leaked out of the police investigation and nothing was forthcoming from students and faculty. And there was still no sign of T.J. Lane’s family on the horizon, not even behind a closed front door or a window curtain.
Something was seriously not right with that child, and it did not have to do with school bullying. Then yesterday on the TV news I saw and heard about the arraignment hearing, the standard initial ruling in such cases that the case would be handled in juvenile court, although the prosecutor would be making a motion to move it to adult court. The video showed T.J. Lane looking scrawny, pale and like a whipped puppy. Then the reporter made a comment that caught my attention, something about a hint from law enforcement that perhaps the case would be kept in juvenile court because of what T.J. had said or how he had behaved during questioning. Nothing more than that. A fleeting whisper of something untoward, something seriously not right with the frail, hollow eyed boy.
This morning on Fox News the clues to what created T.J. Lane and the tragedy at Chardon High School began to fall into place. A reporter had gone to find a house that T.J.’s family had lived in for years which is now empty and abandoned. A neighbor was interviewed who commented that the Lane children were never seen outdoors playing in the yard or neighborhood as long as they lived there. The house was a small, rundown white box of a ranch style home that reminded me of shack, it was so worn looking and the yard overgrown with grass and weeds.
The reporter went into the open house and found the interior a mess as well but that is not unusual in an abandoned, substandard home. The horror was that on the children’s bedroom doors were heavy duty unlocked padlocks hanging on their latches, grim testimony of how T.J. and his siblings grew up when they were not actually in attendance at school. The children were never seen playing outside because they were padlocked into their rooms all the time.
Think on it. Think about what else those parents probably perpetrated on those children besides locking them away from sunlight and normal human interaction. Wonder what, if anything, they were fed, what the level of boredom and inactivity did to their minds as well as their bodies. What physical abuse were they subjected to? That boy grew up starved for food, love, fresh air and sun, and normal human interaction, locked inside a prison.
The reporter went on to say that information has come out indicating T.J. had a girlfriend who broke off their relationship recently, and that one of the boys shot on Monday was her new interest. If that is proven to be the case, one can imagine that for T.J. a normal, empathetic human relationship with a girl was a miraculous lifeline he grabbed to save himself from complete madness and the little house of horrors he had existed in probably from birth. The severance of that lifeline was beyond bearing for a child raised the way he had been, and I suspect whatever was left of his psyche broke beneath the weight of it. Perhaps speculative, but looking more and more likely as time passes and evidence accumulates.
The questioning void appears to be filling up now with information. Although there may have been some teasing involved, perhaps a joke or two in passing about someone losing a girl friend, there certainly appears to have been much more to this tragedy than the original conclusion so many of us wanted to jump to back on Monday. The new questions waiting to be answered are “Why did no one figure this out before now and save the Lane children?” and “What was wrong with the Lane parents in the first place that they treated their children this way?”
I will never forget the emaciated arms and legs, the hollow eyed gaunt and gawky face of T.J. Lane, the shack with padlocks on the bedroom doors, or the children who are wounded and dead from Chardon High School. And I fear for T.J. Lane if and when he realizes what he has done to his innocent school mates, most likely because of what his parents may have done to him. Twenty three years as a State Trooper tells me that there are thousands of T.J. Lanes out there looking for that lifeline in order to maintain or regain their sanity, and there is no end in sight of more such children being raised in our midst.
Tripping Down The Garden Path Into Reality
24 Feb 2012 2 Comments
in Local Issues
It never ceases to amaze me how oblivious bureaucrats can be to the reality that is before them. Case in point is our Salisbury Affordable Housing Commission. I read the minutes of their sub-committee meeting and was amused to see that they are merrily tripping forward down the garden path of turning the Fitting house into multiple workforce dwelling units. They even seem to think there may be a predictable time line of 6-12 months for the TRAC and/or the Transfer Station Building Committee to accomplish its design planning, after which presumably SAHC will be able to do its thing, including perhaps soliciting more money from the town.
No one on SAHC appears to have the least comprehension that an environmental study of the Fitting property has not yet been done in order to establish just how much of it, and which part(s) of it will be usable for the transfer station facility. It is possible that the Fitting house sits on the very place that will have to be utilized for the facility. That means the house will have to be bulldozed. Oh my! Shades of 25 Academy Street only just recently made habitable, but with the sword of Damocles over it, hovering and waiting to fall in about five years.
The town and SAHC are looking at a long slog, as the saying goes, before we know whether or not the bog turtle looms on our horizon, or some other of God’s creation that cannot fend any place else but the Fitting property. On top of that is the question of wetlands, runoff and drainage downhill to the west across the New York state line into the adjacent Millerton land area. Don’t go putting the proverbial cart before the horse, Bobby and Jim. The Transfer Station Building Committee won’t be able to do any concrete planning until it knows the area that it has available to work with.
The other issue that continues to be ignored by SAHC and our two Democratic selectmen is that of promises made when the Fitting property was purchased. Not only were the neighbors in the area assured there would be attractive screening of the facility, but the whole town was told that tale. In addition to the immediate neighbors, those residents on Belgo Road who can see the Fitting property from their homes are still extremely interested in the issue.
The selectmen and former selectman Bob Riva (Chairman of SAHC) may have conveniently forgotten, and the rest of SAHC may be blissfully unaware of that tidbit of history, but those most interested in seeing the screening promise realized have not forgotten. They will not quietly sit by and allow a visual monstrosity to be built unscreened on the Fitting land and the old house may well be meeting up with a wrecking ball. Time, lots of time, will tell.
Original Intent and A Nation of Laws No More
16 Feb 2012 2 Comments
in Legal and Political Philosophy
The Liberal Progressive mantra that our Constitution is a living, breathing document that changes with the times has made us a nation without law from the top down – Federal, State and municipal governments all included. The key to the stripping of meaning from concrete laws in place to maintain a semblance of order in our society has been the lawyer’s game of changing the meaning of words. There is a normal, gradual evolution of any language over time to be expected. More often than not individual words develop several interrelated meanings that are listed together in our dictionaries according to their preeminence or chronological development.
The political and legal professions have made a sport of playing games with the nuanced changes in language and the sometimes completely different meanings for words that develop over time. They use those additions and changes to our language as an excuse to alter what a given law allows or prohibits from one moment to the next instead of changing or correcting the law legislatively. It used to take centuries for the shifts to take place on the meaning of laws, then decades and now the changes can be made to appear in a matter of one year or a few months. It all depends on the what the agenda is at a given point in time.
This is why Original Intent is so important, not only to the reading and understanding of our Constitution, but of any law. The meaning of the language as it was used at the moment in time during which a bill, statute or ordinance was written, debated and passed into law is what sets the elements of that law in stone for our understanding. If we want to change it twenty years down the road then we change it through the legislative process to conform with our contemporary understanding of the language and/or any changing societal expectations as to what should or should not be considered legal within our society.
To change the law extra-legally according to the mood of the times or flavor of the day that one political party or individual judge may want to be the accepted interpretation from a list of meanings to words that have evolved over time, is to have no law from one moment to the next. It allows everyone the license to pick and chose which meaning they want to recognize over others, depending on their own rationalization of their conduct and/or judgment of the behavior of others.
It also makes for successful legal defenses in case of arrest. Befuddling juries and judges with rationalizations based on the latest nuanced meanings of words instead of the Original Intent according to the language set in the time and place a law was legislated in history, has become commonplace in our courtrooms. That is the situation in which we find ourselves today. For all intents and purposes we have become a nation of laws no more, Constitutional or otherwise. Brace yourselves for the anarchy that follows.
Nibbles Do Count
14 Feb 2012 2 Comments
Maggie is fretting over my toes this morning while I drink my coffee and check email. If I move my feet away from her, she reaches out with a paw and claws my left foot back into range. Kind of like financial crime prosecutors trying to “claw back” what was swindled away. Her claws are less than gentle, much more successful at their job than prosecutors, and I have to admonish her to knock it off. The brown eyes look up at me woefully puzzled and she returns to worrying over my toes. Suddenly I feel the teeth nibbling away and sternly tell her “No bites!” The ears perk as her head snaps upward towards me and the eyes give me a slightly steely gaze as if to defiantly say “Nibbles don’t count, Mom!”
Yes, Maggie, nibbles do count. Bites are bites no matter what size they are. We have been at this since the first week of November 2011, when we first brought Maggie home at eight weeks of age. She is a black Lab puppy with all the quintessential Labrador Retriever personality traits to go along with her webbed toes for swimming. Chewing, of course, is paramount.
In anticipation of the toothy onslaught my home was going to suffer, I had purchased some modern, new “gnawing defense” systems, one of which is a batch of red pepper scented stickies for furniture legs. What could be simpler? Almost anything. The minimalist instruction sheet was about two inches by three inches containing few coherent words. The demo pictures all looked identical. I spent an hour trying to figure out which side to peel and stick and which was to remain covered facing out to make the dog sneeze and back off. After successfully applying two stickies to one side table, I decided to revert to my tried and true method of combatting the compulsive chewing of Lab puppies and ran around dragging out all the stored laundry baskets of bones and dog toys accumulated over a lifetime of bringing home rescued dogs from the Little Guild and ARF.
The bones and toys did the trick protecting our furniture, shoes and baseboards. Having innumerable “legal” chew toys available to shove in the puppy mouth every time it embraces a table leg makes life much easier. When they gnaw on the human beings in house a gentle holding of their mouths closed with the admonition “No bites” has always been highly effective for me to convey the idea that it is not okay to bite or chew on the living. But it has been thirty years since we last raised a puppy.
Maggie figured out the correction fairly quickly, although she gets carried away and backslides in moments of frolicking juvenile enthusiasm. A quick “No bites!” returns her to semi-sanity, but the underlying mischievous Lab puppy continues to undermine our best efforts. She gives us the hairy eyeball, reaches out her nose and keeping her tiny front teeth close together presses them up against the human hand, arm, leg or foot and begins rapidly nibbling away with tiny pinches, rather like a chattering reciprocating saw, while staring up at us with those eyes. Daring us to object to such a tiny little variation on the biting theme. She just cannot believe that nibbles count as much as “real” bites do. So here we are at six months of age, still debating the significance of nibbles over my morning coffee, although the small demonstration of rebellion has noticeably subsided in frequency. Shades of my three children years ago pushing the envelope, trying to find a “legal” way around parental edicts. Some things never change and the battle over whether or not nibbles count for puppies is one of the more amusing.
Messiah Obama’s Contraception Mandate vs. Our First Amendment Rights – No Deal!
12 Feb 2012 1 Comment
The most recent power grab by Pres. Obama – nullifying the First Amendment by forcing the Catholic Church along with its adoption agencies, hospitals and schools, to pay for insurance covering contraception services for women – has been fascinating to watch. Pres. Obama’s many assaults on the Constitution belie his experience as adjunct professor of Constitutional Law. Perhaps the emphasis was on “adjunct” and less on “professor.” The man gives every appearance of either total ignorance of the subject or he has nothing but the utmost contempt for the Constitution. Take your pick, but neither choice is admirable or worthy of any following.
Having stupidly stepped into a world of cow manure, our secular Messiah Obama, imitating the quick and evasive weasel as only he can do, came up with another excellent plan. Surely the Catholics and other defenders of the First Amendment would be too silly and blind to figure out the ramifications of the new insurance mandate. Our hero is just too, too brilliant for anyone to be able to outsmart him by unraveling such a clever alternative! And just think how wonderful it is to be able to deny that there is any “compromise,” because there truly is none. Just a dishonest end run around the backside of the First Amendment and the Catholic Church. Problem solved, right?
Wrong. The new insurance mandate just incorporates the cost into higher premiums for the whole insured pool. The Church will still pay for abortion and contraception services against its conscience and faith as detailed by the Wall Street Journal . Now we have the pro-choice extremist groups claiming that the President’s “promise” to revisit and fix the details after the election is something we can trust. I think I will take Archbishop Dolan’s recent comments on the President’s veracity and trustworthiness to heart instead. The promises Obama made to Archbishop Dolan last August were a pack of lies, and we have absolutely nothing we can depend upon to lead us to believe the President is to be trusted now. There can be no compromise, to obfuscations, no negotiating, no nonsense regarding the First Amendment and the fundamental illegality of government interference with our principles of religious faith and practice.
Recent Comments