4 posts tagged “violence”
I am disappointed with the world.
Again.
It never fails to disappoint me in disappointing me.
Every day I hope I move closer to my goal of escaping the world and becoming a recluse.
I've mentioned before that I live in a violent sort of town. 20,000 people, mining, army, farming, lots of testosterone, lots of bars, lots of beer, nothing to do. It doesn't lead anywhere good.
Last time I wrote about it a young man was bashed to within an inch of his life. Just down the road. And in the next few months, some other young men will go to jail for doing that to him.
Many lives ruined over what, five minutes of "fun".
No winners there.
A couple of nights ago another young man here was bashed and kicked to within an inch of his life. He's on life support with a fractured skull.
And I feel broken hearted about the whole affair.
Because everyone talks about it. And everyone says - oh, that was awful, oh poor guy, oh, they need their arses kicked.
But they don't really care.
People are so desensitised to violence that they say all the right words, but don't really feel anything.
You know what I thought about when I heard this had happened? I thought about his mother getting a phone call at 3am in the morning. I thought about her ringing the airline, booking a flight, making the trip to a shitty country town in NSW where her son was working, so she could stand beside his bed and watch him fight for his life, because twelve drunken idiots had decided his life wasn't worth anything.
Her beautiful boy.
Her beautiful boy come to this.
And if he dies, all he'll be to anyone is three or four lines in a newspaper.
A few years ago it used to be our teenage girls we had to worry about. And god, I still do, every time they leave the house. But now it seems to be our boys we have to worry about more. So much senseless random violence out there.
Kickings, bashings, glassings, stabbings.
Someones son, brother, father, boyfriend, husband.
Spare a thought for this young man. Wrong place, wrong time people say. Is that meant to be some sort of comfort.
When a crime occurs in a country town it really gets the gossip and the rumours running wild.
I live in a pretty violent town I think. For a population of under twenty thousand, there's plenty of murder and mayhem going on. In fact last month the town had what the local paper called a Crime Spree.
Spree. Makes it sound like we're all out having a fun old time. Of course that didn't include the murder. That was this month. Just general spree.
So Daz rings me up one morning last week and said
there's a crime scene at the brothel
what happened?
don't know, I'll go find out.
So off he went to question the policewoman guarding the scene. She said
I can't tell you what happened, but there's been a lot of crime this end of town since the nightclub opened.
He said
We need more police in town on weekends
She said
You need more taxis
Well, thats one way of looking at it I guess.
So off he went to his next reliable source. The panel beater.
Oh yes, some guy tried to set two other people alight, then went around the corner and set a house on fire.
Hmm. Off to the next source. The windscreen repair man
A beating he said. A gang of teens belted up two guys. One dead, one on life support.
Holy shit, thats bad.
Then later on he's at the bottle shop and the woman who works there tells him
It was a shooting. A gang of kids (well known in town) shot two guys. One dead.
Now Daz does work at the brothel. Hang on, fixing the airconditioning that is! So I said to him
Just go over there and do something dodgy to the airconditioners so they have to call you in, then ask what happened.
Can't, they're on the roof.
Then wouldn't you know it, my most reliable source of information came home from school. Lizzie. I tell you, if you want to keep up to date with whats news, breed yourself a teenage girl.
Turns out it was the bashing that happened. No one dead thank god. But two in hospital. And everyone in her group knowing who did it. I asked her if she thought there could've been a totally unrelated shooting somewhere else in town. She said no, but there had been a house set on fire, but not by these boys.
Anyway turns out Chief Wiggum is not running our police force like I feared. I was thinking they may be the only ones in town that didn't know who did it. I was contempleting an anonymous phone call today if there wasn't some news in the paper. But they're onto it. And I believe they've even solved the murder.
You know, these young men, with their fists and feet ready and willing really worry me. I read in the paper yesterday that two guys were walking home late one night and they were beaten badly. A car stopped and two guys and a girl got out with bats and, what was it, something like stakes and belted them. Now you don't carry bats around in the car unless you're planning on hurting someone with them. We had a guy killed here a couple of years ago in a bashing/kicking episode. I wonder where all this anger has come from. It's not really anger, just a willingness to hurt someone, badly, for no reason, with no thought of the consequences.
You may remember that last year Lloyd travelled overseas spending a lot of the time on his own. England, Europe, America and I didn't worry about him half as as much as I do when he's here on a friday night walking home from the pub.
Just another reason for me to save hard to get my little house, away from the world, where I can become a recluse.
Why is it that as soon as my son heads off overseas, the world goes insane.
Just before he left there was the australian guy bashed and thrown into a fire pitt in California by the homeless men. Now we have that terrible incident where the young australian guy was bashed to death by the bouncers in Greece. Seeing his father on TV last night was very sad. Mistaken identity. Which is such a load of crap. Even if they did think he stole a bag - which he didn't - its not really an excuse to kill him is it.
And I think Lloyd is only making 2 greyhound bus trips. But still. That sure was some freaky shit.
Not to mention the guy who cut his girlfriend up and took some photos of her. WTF people.
I've been having some bad dreams lately due to all this. Plus there was a car accident here through the week and a young mother died and we had some other bad news.
I sometimes feel like finding a small cave somewhere and hiding away from the world. I want to gather my brood and put them back in the safe box I had them in.
You know I remember when Anita Cobby was killed. And it was one of the most shocking things we'd ever heard of. Everyone was horrified and it was probably the beginning of feeling unsafe for a lot of women out at night. But you know, things like that happen so much now, we're not even surprised. You hear that someone has had their head cut off on a bus trip, for no reason, and you're so desensitised, you're not even that disturbed by it. You can just keep cooking dinner like it 'twas nuthin.
I wonder sometimes what will become of the world. It seems so violent you wonder how the tide can be turned. I have this vision of it ending like Escape From New York.
I hope Snake Plissken is there. He can share my cave.
The RSPCA aren't mucking around this time. They have a new campaign out and you won't see any cute little puppies or chickens with bandages on their legs running across the screen while All Creatures Great and Small play in the background.
This new campaign they have adresses the issue of domestic violence and animal abuse.
The fact that a large percentage of violent criminals admit to having been cruel to animals as children.
But even more frightening and sad is that many women involved in abusive relationships stay because of the family pet. She fears what the abuser may do to the pet if she leaves or the abuser uses threats against the pet to keep her there.
And the thing that really sucks is that broadcasters are reluctant to air the ads. In fact since seeing it on the news a while back I haven't seen one of the ads on TV. Broadcasters are concerned because in the past ads showing domestic violence have recieved a lot of complaints.
Thats because people feel better if they don't have to acknowledge whats going on out there. If they don't see it, it's not happening.
Here's a sneak peak at one. Get behind the RSPCA.
