A Complete Disgrace

This one’s going to be on the ranty side.

There’s this local program here called "Crime Watch" that started here a few months ago. On this show the host goes up and down the country shining a very bright spotlight on criminal activity going on in T&T. He’ll tackle anything, from shoplifting, to car theft, to robbery and even murder. He seems wantonly disregard his own safety as he points fingers, and names names. If he has a wanted criminal’s photo or a recorded video of a crime, he runs it without hesitation and he's constantly taking politicians to task.

Basically, thee dude’s insane. But he’s the kind of insane we may need right now. Perhaps sitting back and idly saying nothing is what has earned us the horrendous murder we have right now. What is sure is that he has been stepping on a lot of toes (Did I mention he takes on crooked cops too?).

Anyway, it was on this show that I first heard about the story of a seventeen year old school girl being thrown into a drainage ditch and beaten by another girl from the same school. And, since we now live in an age where everyone has a video recording device in their pockets, the incident was captured by someone and uploaded to the web. Below is the video clip. If you’re going to view it, be warned that it’s not pretty. Someone decided to add rap music to it and the actual beating is about 2½ minutes in. If you do watch, I recommend skipping to that part.

If you’re like me this gets you right in that spot that makes your eye twitch and veins in your head bulge.

A local paper ran the story soon afterward, giving the victim’s account. In it, the story goes that she and her attacker were friends for several years until that “friend” got mixed up in the wrong company. They got into petty arguments after that that caused the victim to break off the friendship. On the last day of end of term exams, the victim got word of her now former friend’s intention to confront her. She tried to avoid the conflict but was unsuccessful. The other girl and other members of the gang she had joined followed her, jeering. Then, when the victim finally got a taxi to stop and tried to get in they blocked her and that is when the beating began.

What the hell!?! I’m upset that it even happened, to begin with. I know, school fights aren’t new or even rare, but that doesn’t make it acceptable, far less, right. If the victim’s side is really how it went down then this attack was unprovoked. That former friend was simply doing it for the sake of fitting in with her new so-called “friends”.

To top it off, the full video (not this one) shows another person joining in on the beating soon afterward. This wasn’t another member of the gang the friend had joined and not another student either. Hell, she wasn’t even in the same age group. She was actually identified a twenty-seven year old cousin of the assailant.

TWENTY-SEVEN!?! What the hell is an adult, almost in her thirties, doing getting involved in this other than to break it up? (Which no one attempted to do, by the way.) Actually, no, that woman should be ashamed to even call herself an adult.

These things don’t make sense. There’s no reason. They are nothing more than a grim manifestation of human beings’ desire to inflict damage on each other for no other reason than inflicting it. This kind of distress makes us want to consider locking our children in the house so they can make it to the end of the day in one piece.