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Our nihilistic society
A driver of a pick-up truck in downtown Manhattan drives backward up a one-way street while talking on his cellphone. People are yelling at him to stop but he doesn’t hear them. His truck hits a woman who is crossing the street and kills her. He is not arrested. The fact that he was using a cellphone while driving a truck backward in a one-way street and killed someone and is not arrested for this does not become an occasion for outrage or even questions. The media and everyone else, including the dead women’s grief-stricken colleagues at NYU Law School, treat it all as a routine matter, or as a “tragic” accident. The most detailed account I’ve found (and it’s not detailed at all as it’s impossible to get from this story a clear, step-by-step picture of what happened) is in the New York Post. The lack of intellectual curiosity about how this woman was actually killed, and the lack of any moral sense about it, go hand in hand. As Samuel Johnson said, to think reasonably is to think morally. When people lose any interest in doing the latter, they lose any interest in doing the former as well. The woman’s name is Kim Barry. She was from the Bahamas, was 35 years old, and was a law instructor at NYU Law School. Her specialty was working to get felons in Florida the right to vote. She was struck last week, but her identify was not known until a couple of days later and she didn’t die until last Saturday. The driver’s name is Maher Safer, which sounds like a Mideastern, possibly Iranian or Parsi name.
A few years ago a father and his small son were mowed down and killed by a New York City bus as they crossed a street in Soho. Witnesses said the driver had gone through a red light, but no charges were made against him. After a few weeks, I called up the D.A.’s office to try to find out what had happened, but the assistant D.A. would tell me nothing. If no charges are made, the facts in the case do not become public. Thus a person could kill someone, and if the DA decides not to prosecute, the public has no way of finding out the details of how the death occurred or why there was no prosecution. Comments
One can only hope Maher Safa does time for this. His homicidal gross negligence deserves a long time away. Not that anyone pays much attention to it, but it is a crime in New York to talk on a mobile phone while driving, just as it is to run people over through sheer carelessness. This tragic vignette contains lots of little hints about what today’s multicult New York is like, as well as how the press obfuscates things. An immigrant/illegal alien from somewhere Middle Eastern (the NYU student paper only identifies Safa as “from Fort Lee, N.J.” - if he’s from Fort Lee, I’m from Baghdad) runs over another immigrant, this one a Bahamian woman who secured a place in one of America’s premier law schools (no disrespect to the late Kim Barry, but I hope I may be forgiven suspecting affirmative action in her admission as a student and retention as a teacher). The foreign lady’s purpose in the United States seems to have been to undermine the laws of Florida, although she didn’t live there. This is today’s Rotten Apple: a place politically part of the United States that is becoming more alien by the day. Safa should pay dearly for his thoughtless killing of Miss Barry, but probably he should never have been in New York in the first place. Should she have been? I hope this comment does not seem too harsh, but I was struck as I read Mr. Auster’s post and the linked articles that this sad incident was also yet another example of the displacement of Americans in their own country. HRS Posted by: Howard Sutherland on November 24, 2004 3:12 PMEurope is the canary in the coal mine for us. What happens there win the next decade, possibly two, will show the effects of jihad ideology in all of its awful effecient audacity. Posted by: Andrew on November 24, 2004 4:00 PMI once attempted to phone canadian immigration about an individual who illegally brought his girlfriend into to the country so she could get free medical treatment at our expense. Needless to say, the immigration authorities didn’t even have a mechanism to handle complaints or process information on illegals. The point? How can society dislodge the cabal who now run the institutions deeded to protect us? They loathe the society that lets these bureaucrats eat cavier regularly, while they scorn everything that makes it possible. In a suprising analysis, Jesse Jackson summed up slick Willy as nothing more than an appetite. That’s an economical verbage for describing the state of society’s guardians today. For example, I think many people only appeared moved about 9/11 as though protocol demanded a greiving disposition. After watching a brief documentary the other day on 9/11, I was awe struck the way the attack and its profound consequences have been side stepped by the media. Will qualify that in the context of this thread, that any crime or act war is subjuncted to the grief coverage, never really allowing people to process the morality of the atrocity. After all in a liberal world there is no good or bad in life, just a series of events who’s constructs may benefit or damage us. To moralize on them would create conflict, something liberals will avoid at the expense of your right to free choice. Just consider how the liberal media is using the victims families as poster children for liberal causes. This case shows how deeply sick and disturbing the loss of a common moral reality is. Posted by: obvious on November 24, 2004 4:33 PMWhat is the big deal about this story? In a third world country, one third-worlder runs over another one all the time. New York City is a Third World city, and America is becoming a Third World country, so this kind of event will just become more and more common. The rest of us need to get with the program and stop trying to impose our stuffy First World ideas about the “well-ordered and well-mannered society” upon the colorful cast of characters coming to our shores. Such anachronistic Anglo-American attitudes threaten to distance us from diversity, when we should be learning to “celebrate diversity”, right? Posted by: Clark Coleman on November 24, 2004 7:55 PM |