Social Commentary

Sorry, but I just had to comment on something that’s been a kinda local event for about 3 weeks now. Nine year old Jessica Lumsford was found missing from her grandparents’ house in late February. However, due to the fact that only here in her nightgown and a stuffed means they think he might have done it, but since they have no legal proof, they’re saying they just wanna talk to this guy so that his lawyer doesn’t try and sue them. Anyways, said person of interest apparently decided that escape was the better part of valor and hightailed it to Georgia, and when police caught up to him, he was in the process of trying to buy a bus ticket to Tennessee under a different name. Now, that in and of itself would make me suspicious, but when you add in the fact he violated his parole/probation and got a felony charge for leaving the state without notifying his corrections officer (he was on probation for a sex offense charge, I believe), that all adds up to pretty damning evidence that, if he wasn’t guilty, it at least looked VERY suspicious. Well, while in custody in Georgia, he admited under oath and took a polygraph attesting to the fact that he kidnapped and killed Jessica. Not only that, but he lived not 200 yards from her grandparents’ house. But, since she wasn’t registered as having a permanent residence at her grandparents’ house (she lived with her father, I believe, and was being babysat by her grandparents), then the standard regulation that he not be within a certain distance of small children was null. I mean, I understand that the system cannot always be foolproof and catch all the bad guys who try to slip through the cracks, but I feel so much for her father, who, through all of this turmoil, still tried to keep himself sane by insisting that his daughter was still alive somewhere (autopsy will probably prove that she was dead no more than 2 days after she was abducted, which is what’s typical for this kind of abduction). I mean, I think how I would feel if my child was lost and all I had to hold onto was the belief that she was still alive somewhere. But why does this kind of thing happen so often? I mean, I understand that there are all kinds of evil in the world, but what kind of evil is it to think that children are well, nice like that? It just boggles my mind. I’m sorry, but when they reported in the paper today that they found her little body behind the guy’s house (where he told investigators they could find her), it just made my heart ache. Not only that, but, by all reports, this fucking bastard has yet to show remorse for what he’s done. I’m sorry, but in my personal opinion, he should be sentenced to a medium length sentence, and then set loose in the general prison population, because, as anyone knows, child molesters are really not liked very much in prison (honor among thieves, I guess), and I’m sure no guard would bat an eye if he suddenly turned up with a skiv in his ribs.

Not only that, but I also wanted to comment on the baseball subpoenas done to be before the House Committee on steroids. One things I noticed right off the bat: they had live feed on ESPN until at least 8 pm EST, and, in all my time growing up in DC, I’ve never really heard of any Congressional hearing going beyond 6 or 6:30 at the latest, but the fact this ran until at least 8 shows how seriously Congress is taking this issue. Also, I thought it sadly amusing how Mark McGwire, out of all those baseball players current and former, kept repeating that he wasn’t here to talk about the past (when asked if he’d ever used steroids), but, when pressed by a panel member if he wanted to take the Fifth, McGwire just kept repeating this bullshit about “let’s keep it to the present”. What utter bull. I’m sorry, Mark, but why don’t you just go ahead and say “sure, I did them.” I mean, if anyone took one look at him now, with graying red hair, low muscle tone, and getting a little on the pudgy side, well, what else are you going to suppose? But, at the same time, I do believe that Conseco’s book, while it undoubtedly has some truth to it, was probably inflated to sell books, but he may have also used this as an opportunity to get back at certain people who ignored him after he was blackballed by the MLB. I dunno, but I do agree with the Representative who was himself a former Hall of Fame pitcher who proposed that those players who won Hall of Fame stats due to steroid use should have those records wiped. One last thing on the subject: One representative asked the Chief Medical Officer of the MLB if he thought that the thing today about society being told by TV shows and advertisements that how they look isn’t good enough, or pretty enough, or fast enough had any influence on people being more prone to wanting to at least try out steroids or human body enhancements. I think it does…I think that people are bombarded on all sides by “people” who say that they need this or that to be complete or good enough or whatever. What the fuck ever happened to being happy with the way you were?