Life is often a balance between good and evil…and sometimes between life and death. The past seven days saw death post more than a few W’s…but we also experienced many reminders of the need to protect life.
Of course, the passing of Queen Elizabeth II—after 70 years on the throne of England—impacted people around the world who had long admired her grace, her strength of will, and the inspiration she gave so many in times of both triumph and tragedy. Great Britain began the week with a Queen and with Boris Johnson as Prime Minister; it ended scant days later with a King and with Liz Truss as PM. So much change in so little time…with more ahead in Queen Elizabeth’s funeral and the coronation of her son as King Charles III.
Here at home, we marked the 21st anniversary of the cowardly 9/11 attacks which killed thousands at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and on Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The annual remembrance is not about any of us who are living; it is about those who were lost and about the 343 brave FDNY firefighters and emergency personnel who are given credit for getting 20,000 people out of the Twin Towers before they collapsed. Survivors like retired FDNY captain Matt Bruce—now living in Tampa—tell me “We were all part of a team. We all knew what we had to do. It was a very dangerous day 21 years ago, and remains a day we remember and honor those that we lost. We will never forget.” So many precious lives lost.
But the intersection of life and death this week was not limited to marking a national day of mourning or being glued to radio and TV following the death of a monarch across the ocean. We had plenty of random killings across our nation with dozens more shootings in Chicago and even a beheading (!) in San Carlos, California which left a young mother of two dead…allegedly at the hand of an estranged boyfriend.
Nowhere was society’s descent into madness more in evidence than in the city of Memphis this week. It began with police locating the body of a kindergarten teacher who was out jogging but soon found herself forced into an SUV where a young man who had gained early release from prison sexually assaulted and then brutally murdered her. Police named Cleotha Abston—who has a lengthy juvenile record dating back to 1995 when he was only 11 years old—with the sick murder. In 2000 he was sentenced to 24 years in prison for kidnapping a Memphis lawyer…but he did not serve his full sentence, with tragic consequences.
Then the city endured a four hour shooting spree that police charged was perpetrated by 19-year-old Ezekiel Kelly…himself out of prison after serving only 11 months of a three year sentence involving aggravated assault with a weapon. His alleged rampage ended with seven people shot—four of them fatally—and police say Kelly even live-streamed some of his shooting on social media while laughing at his victims.
Memphis ended the week dealing with posted threats from two other young men threatening to “Cleo” the community—a reference to the criminal under arrest for murdering kindergarten teacher Eliza Fletcher. One such threat involved a plan to randomly “shoot a grandmother in front of her grandkids.”
Such malicious violence and total disregard for life is depressingly sad, especially because it never needed to be promulgated in our nation. But “social workers” and pointy-headed academic professors and other apologists can always find ways to justify the actions of murderous mutants in America by blaming everything from slavery to “inequity” as a means to release them from prison before their sentences are completed. Murder rates have soared over the past year and not just in Memphis. Random, senseless killings are circling closer and closer to all of us whether in big cities and small towns…as lives of good people are snuffed out by criminal delinquents who are increasingly coddled by Democrat district attorneys and myopic judges.
Hopefully enough Americans regardless of political party affiliation have had enough—far more than enough—of this assault on our society and they will turn out in the Midterms this November in a tsunami of righteous indignation and sweep conservative, law & order candidates into office at all levels of local, state and national government. Because as things stand now, if you or I are murdered on the street today…the killer—if apprehended—is likely to be released on no-cash bail before our body gets to the morgue. And tomorrow the policeman will face charges of false arrest and “microaggressions.”
A society that doesn’t value life—whether through coddling rampaging criminal thugs or by pretending that murdering unborn babies is simply “a choice”—cannot stand. We are on the brink, and November could very well be our last chance to save America. Let’s not blow it over being distracted by lefties in the news media ignoring these very real threats to our lives and families by instead focusing on the endless and pointless January 6th Committee hearings and whining by MSNBC miscreants about documents seized while raiding President Trump’s private residence at Mar-A-Lago.
Personally, I could care less if Donald Trump had a top secret dossier regarding the nuclear capability of Canada or Haiti in his home…while the lives of Americans are routinely under assault by criminal stalkers from coast to coast. It’s time to stand up for the precious, God-given gift of life…and to protect good people who make our world a better place rather than those who subtract from the sum total of decent society here in the United States.