One of my favorite books growing up was Jay J. Armes, Investigator: The World’s Most Successful Private Eye written in 1976 and published by Macmillan. I remember holding the hardcover book in my hands and wondering how the man on the cover, Jay J. Armes, was able to shoot a gun with hooks for hands.
No blog that tries to address issues in the urban core can let Martin Luther King, Jr. Day pass without a deliberate salute to a man who dedicated his life to improving keystone images in an Urban Semiotic.
Is having children a societal right or does it go beyond society and into the realm of sacrosanct individual choice that owes no explanation or responsibility to anyone else?
Do children belong to their parents or to society?
Should the severely mentally disabled be allowed to have children if they cannot afford to pay for their upbringing or even understand what it means to be a parent? Does sexual drive always triumph over intellect?
Should there be a means test before the abject poor are allowed to reproduce? Is it a selfish burden on all of society to bring a child into being if there are no established familial resources to support the child’s well-being?
Should the professionally diagnosed mentally ill be allowed to reproduce?
Or are the psychological problems of the parents only needlessly compounded within the offspring?
If a killer is found guilty of a court of law, should that murderer lose the freedom to reproduce because the irony taking a life only to give a life later is too bitter for society to bear?
Should there be an age limit on having children in order to better promise the unborn child a more responsible and vibrant parent? No one under 21 would be allowed to have children and no one over 40 would be allowed to have children, either.
Yesterday, the Jersey Journal reported this in one article:
There were 50 homicides in Hudson County in 2005, the most since 1989. Thirty-nine of those homicides happened in Jersey City — the highest city total since 1982.
My recent report on the Jersey City killing of a family turned yesterday when the alleged killer was arrested three miles away. He slit his wrists the day he murdered his sister and two of her children, and then checked himself into Cabrini Green Medical Center in New York City under an assumed name for a “suicide watch.”
A multi-state manhunt over the last month turned up nothing. I’ve claimed here before the criminal mind is a kind of genius that, if turned around, could inherit strength and goodness into the world but first we have to find a way to stop that mind from murdering through its genius.
With less than three months before the end of the year, here is an update on killings in Hudson County in New Jersey compared with numbers from Essex County in New Jersey and New York County in New York. All homicide rates are per 100,000:
The bottom of an air shaft in a West New York, New Jersey apartment building became a 31-foot deep tomb for one baby and nearly a death sentence for a second. Last week the sounds of a newborn crying echoed throughout the West New York apartment building until residents called 911 to get help in discovering the source of the muffled cries.
I am slowly realizing my current hometown of Jersey City, New Jersey is quickly becoming Murder City, USA. Yesterday, I discovered the going street price of a life in Jersey City is $6.66 as the murdered bodies of a woman and her two children — a boy aged six and a girl aged 13 — were found stabbed to death in a Greenville apartment. They died Monday.
On the fourth anniversary of 9/11 I would like to direct you to an article I wrote for GO INSIDE Magazine a year after the world fell called Celebrate the Dead, Mourn the Living:
….We all were breathing and smelling the fiery ashes of 2,800 corpses as their flesh filled the sky. It is a smell you will never forget. When you cannot escape the evidence of murder as it fills your lungs every day you turn inward to memorialize the reality in a positive manner so the horror of it all won’t eat you alive in the quiet times.
I decided inhaling the ashes of those who died was a way of reanimating each of them by giving them life within me. By drinking in the bits of them blowing in the wind, I became greater than myself, bound by their hopes and sobered by their dreams, and I was making all those strangers a part of me….
You can read the rest of the article here and then come back here to share your feelings and memories of 9/11 if you wish.
You can read all the GO INSIDE Magazine coverage of the first anniversary here where you will find some moving and memorable takes on the events of infamy from the rest of the staff.
Yesterday I was out for my daily walk along Palisade Avenue in Jersey City when I heard sounds 50 yards ahead of me I had never experienced before: Tires screeching on asphalt; a thump; crushing metal. Ahead of me people leapt out of their cars and from their porches. A cop on his lunch hour bolted from his parked cruiser with a sandwich still in his hand.
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