Saturday, August 13, 2005

Easy To Be Hard

.
You need only to pick up a newspaper. You need only to watch the news on TV. You need only to listen to the news on the radio....
....Angry father in argument over the TV remote, walks out and sets house on fire. His wife and three kids die in the fire.

How can people be so heartless
How can people be so cruel
Easy to be hard, easy to be cold
13-year-old teen kills Grandmother over curfew. Brother say his sister wanted stay out until midnight, but his Grandmother told her to be in by eleven. The girl then struck the 82-year-old woman several times with a fireplace poker.

How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to be proud, easy to say no

Mourning father of son killed in Afghan by roadside bombing, forces another car off the road. He pulls out a pistol and shoots and kills a 33-year-old mother of three. His reason? The woman's car had a bumper sticker that said "Vote Bush."

Especially people who care about strangers
Who care about evil and social injustice
Do you only care about bleeding crowd
How about a needing friend, I need a friend

When informed by his 18-year-old mistress that she was pregnant with his child, a 40-year-old off-duty police officer runs the woman down in deserted parking lot.

How can people be so heartless
You know I'm hung up on you
Easy to be proud, easy to say no

Man shoots convenience store clerk who refuses to accept $100 bill for the purchase of a 75 cent can of cola.

Especially people who care about strangers
Who care about evil and social injustice
Do you only care about bleeding crowd
How about a needing friend, we all need a friend

13-year-old girl stabs a 15-year-old boy because he refused her offer to perform oral sex on him. She had just performed the act on three other boys. The girl claimed she had to have oral sex with ten boys that day before she would be accepted into a friendship group with classmates.

How can people be so heartless
How can people be so cruel
Easy to be proud, easy to say no
Easy to be cold, easy to say no

A 17-year-old basketball player ties up his teacher, 31, with duct tape and then sodomizes her in front of class because she was going to fail him. Failing the class would have made him ineligible for the team. He told the teacher that if she flunked him, she would get more of the same until she passed him.

Come, on, easy to give in, easy to say no
Easy to be cold, easy to say no

Much too easy to say no

This is probably a sad and disturbing way to incorporate a very good Three Dog Night song into a posting, but the above snippets all appeared in recent newspaper on the same day, and the words to the song somehow seemed to be appropriate. It's a maddening sick world. Any song I chose would be tainted by the news nowadays.

No.287

3 comments:

the many Bs said...

Mike, what newspaper are you reading? I'm serious. I used to be a regular watcher of Forensic Files and Cold Case Files and all of those true crime shows and there is a lot of crappy stuff that goes on for seemingly small reasons. I don't understand it either. I think some people are not very emotionally mature, others have no control over their anger.

I read the newspaper here several times a week and consider myself fairly aware of current events. These type of stories always catch my eye, but I've NEVER seen even half as many as you just listed in ONE issue. Geesh. ARe the majority of the sickos over on your coast?

Anonymous said...

Uh-Oh! Sorry, this was from one article about a four-block area in Boston near a low-income housing development considered to be one of the top 10 dangerous neighborhoods in America, it placed 6th. Also, those incidents, and I only picked about a third listed happened over an 18 month period.
It was late when I posted and i forgot that fact. Even so, over 18 months it is scary.

the many Bs said...

Pretty disturbing stuff.