Thursday, April 28, 2011

What a Crime!

An item caught my eye in the USA Today: in Norwalk, Connecticut, which I will just betcha has got a lot of well-to-do people. (Actually, I checked this guess, and guess what? I'm right. Norwalk is better off--considerably better off--than the rest of Connecticut, not to mention the nation, in a bunch of categories. Like: income per capita, median household income, and both male and female per capita income.) You can rest assured that this is a community that is careful to keep the riffraff in line.

The story is a homeless woman, one Tanya McDowell, an unemployed cook who lives in her van is being charged with the felonies of committing and attempting to commit larceny, i.e., "almost" $16,000 worth of education for her son, a kindergartner. What she allegedly did was used her babysitter's school district to enroll him in a Norwalk school instead of nearby Bridgeport, "a significantly poorer district."

So here's what strikes me, once again. The extraordinary privilege wealth entitles. In this case superior education, not only at the beginning, but all through. People like Tanya McDowell's son are doomed from the age of five to grow up to be somebody marginalized by a lousy education. And a mother that tries to squeeze just some little advantage for her kid is branded a criminal. Now, I ask you: do you really blame this woman? Why should there be such disparity in public education? The answer is in a word: money.

What do you think the chances are the system is going to be forgiving here? Can you believe that a city would actually try to squeeze $16,000 out of a homeless person because she tried to dodge the inevitable for her kid, even if just for a year? You bet your sweet ass it will. Oh, and she also faces 20 years in prison for this heinous crime. What a frigging outrage! Need I remind you that not a single one of the Wall Street criminals has spent a minute in jail or been hauled before the court of law for crimes that affected literally millions of people? Outrageous!

Stay tuned. Apparently this case is arousing a lot of similar reaction all over the country.

1 comment:

Montag said...

Excellent story.
Modern Les Miserables... the wretched of the earth!
We live in a novel written by Hugo and Dickens and it is becoming more and more oppressive.