What the hell kind of kids are people raising in this country today?

Earlier this week, Pam wrote about what a miserable September it's been for gay youth around the country. Now, late today, comes word that a promising young musician and student at Rutgers University, Tyler Clementi, jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate and another student videotaped him having sex with a male classmate and posted the video on the Web:

It started with a Twitter message on Sept. 19: “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

That night, the authorities say, the Rutgers University student who sent the message used a camera hidden in his dormitory room to broadcast the roommate’s intimate encounter live on the Internet.

And three days later, the roommate who had been surreptitiously filmed — Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman and an accomplished violist — jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River in an apparent suicide.

The Sept. 22 death, which the authorities disclosed on Wednesday, was the second high-profile suicide this year that followed alleged incidents of cyber-bullying. In January, a high school student in South Hadley, Mass., hanged herself in her home after months of reported harassment by a group of students on Web sites and in text messages.

[snip]

The Middlesex County Prosecutor’s office said that Mr. Clementi’s roommate, Dharun Ravi, 18, of Plainsboro, N.J., and another classmate, Molly Wei, 18, of Plainsboro, N.J., had each been charged with two counts of invasion of privacy for using “the camera to view and transmit a live image” of Mr. Clementi. The most severe charges carry a maximum sentence of five years in jail.

Mr. Ravi was charged with two additional counts of invasion of privacy for attempting a similar live feed on the Internet on Sept. 21, the day before the suicide. A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, James O’Neill, said the investigation was continuing, but he declined to “speculate on additional charges.”

There have always been bullies, but nothing like what we see today. What kind of a sick, twisted fuck do you have to be to do something like this?

An added twist to this case is that the two perpetrators of this heinous act of bullying are both minorities. Dharun Ravi appears to be of Indian descent and Molly Wei appears to be of Chinese descent. They are from Plainsboro, NJ, a diverse town in which 16.97% of residents identified as Indian-American in the 2000 census (second only to Edison) and 8.55% self-identified as of Chinese ancestry. It's an affluent town as well, with median family income of $102,586 as of a 2007 estimate. (source) You'd think that a diverse town with a high median income and one of the top school systems in the country wouldn't be raising a bunch of bullies. But then, the haves bullying the have-nots is nothing new, is it.

Not much information about Ravi and Wei has been released as yet, though I suspect that will change. I'm sure that there are those who will be tempted to insist that their own lily-white Anglo-Saxon children would NEVER do something like that, or worse, that because Tyler Clementi was gay, he somehow "deserved it". But those who are tempted to think this should read about Phoebe Prince, a high school student who was bullied into suicide in Massachusetts earlier this year; about Asher Brown, Seth Walsh, or any of the other gay kids who have seen no way out but suicide.

Being bullied is always traumatic for a child or adolescent. Those of us who were small, or fat, or jut plain weird, have always been bullied. But today, when the bullying can take place in front of a huge audience, and when you throw in the anti-gay rhetoric being spouted by right-wing politicians, which gives an imprimatur of approval to homophobic bullying by straight young males who no doubt have issues about their own sexuality and send a signal to gay teens that the very power structures in this country will hound them even if their classmates aren't at the moment, it's not difficult to understand how a young man like Tyler Clementi might be driven to not just talk about jumping off the George Washington Bridge, but actually do it.

To get a sense of how distraught this young man was, consider that Fort Lee, where the bridge is located, is at least an hour drive from Rutgers. How determined do you have to be when you can spend an hour driving and not reconsider? But what's more frightening is what kind of kids are people raising these days that they think surreptitiously videotaping another kid's private activities and posting them without consent is OK? Do kids have NO sense of consequences whatsoever? I don't care what celebrities get away with.

The next time a Congressman or Senator gets up before Congress or goes on a cable news show and talks about the "homosexual agenda", I would hope that they would think about Tyler Clementi -- a talented musician with a brilliant future ahead of him who saw nothing but taunting and persecution in that future and decided it was too high a price to pay and that death looked good by comparison.

Dispaches From The Planet of the Apes....

Back when my granddad bought this place, North Stamford was considered the backwoods, with dirt roads and a pretty sparse population. Gentrification has pushed out alot of the original old timers but we still have our share of oddballs. Now, I may be one myself, in the new order, because I keep chickens, but that's not the kind of thing that would rate as all that odd up here in the detritus of family places sitting on overgrown prime land and the secrets therein. Its not unusual for specially licensed professionals to keep exotic animals in their homes, but its a little unusual that a troublesome 200 lb Chimp was allowed to remain in what had become a populated residential area.

Travis the chimp was not the cute little guy in the Old Navy commercials anymore. He was not that little guy in diapers driving around town in the company truck... and Sandra Herold was not an animal handler by any stretch. Herold is an eccentric who had managed to grandfather in the ability to keep this wild and increasingly unmanageable animal under wraps and perhaps illegally in her residence. Travis was a disaster waiting to happen, and with his ability to get out of cars, stop traffic, drive cars himself, not to mention his threatening actions, its a wonder that only one person was so severely injured. When Travis stopped downtown traffic for 2 hours last year, it was a warning that things were out of hand. If what happened here on Tuesday had happened downtown, there could have been a much higher death toll.

Whatever was going on with Travis on Tuesday morning that caused Herold to call her friend Charla Nash to help her get the animal inside, is unclear. Sandra Herold has already given him an unprescribed dose of Xanax in tea to try to calm him and get him into the house, (Xanax has not been tested on Chimpanzees.) What is clear, from the reports of the first responders, is that Nash got out of her car with a doll for Travis and he attacked. As those first responders pulled up the drive, Travis appeared with blood dripping from his mouth and down his chest. He raised his arms like a gorilla, running back and forth between threatening the approaching rescuers and what looked like a crumpled mannequin on the lawn, but was actually Nash, continuing to chew her face some more as if she was his kill and they were threatening it.

She didn't even look like an actual person because she basically had no face, no scalp....The responders retreated, backing their truck away, because they knew that Travis could tear the door off their truck and there was no way for them to get to Nash until police sharp shooters arrived. When police approached the scene, Travis partially tore the door off their cruiser, causing an officer to begin shooting him with his .45. It took 5 shots to get Travis to retreat into his house, where he fell to the floor and died. Rescue workers were able to get Nash to the hospital where she remains in critical condition, but those on the scene can't imagine how she can live through the injuries she sustained. Bits of her were left on the lawn there along with the doll she brought to try to calm him.

This morning Sandra Herold was all over the news, giving interviews telling us that Travis looked up to her as if to say "Mom, what did you do?" What did she do? Well, that's an interesting question. She certainly didn't keep Travis in a proper enclosure. She certainly didn't think of her neighbor's safety, including the many young mothers in this neighborhood pushing baby carriages along the roads. She also didn't seem to be at the hospital outside of her "best friend's" room, waiting for word on her condition. Perhaps she has been told to stay away, but honestly, to use this time to make excuses for a wild animal behaving the way that many, many mature male chimpanzees behave, is insane.

Its not that Herold is considered to be a particularly sane person around here, anyway. Maybe she is just negligent and the city is to blame, but I for one, would like some answers. I have a teen who is outside quite a bit, and taking walks on these same roads with his friends, and I'd like to know that any dangerous animals are kept responsibly and that they are visited by the inspector from time to time. This monkey was allowed to drive around in a company truck when he was young, but by the time he has grown to over 200 lbs and was being kept by a disheveled woman (who was alone after having lost her husband,) living in a chaotic house, I would like to know that someone has a handle on things.

Back when I lived in Montana, I met a guy, Doug Seus, who raised and trained Bart the Bear, of The Bear fame (among other movies.) Yes, he was a cuddly animal, and the trainers that worked with him all the time could hug him and cuddle with him like he was a puppy. But he was also, like the many other wild animals that Doug raised and trained for show business, a wild animal. There were always handlers present, and one of my roommates back then had actually been a handler for Doug when Bart was a baby, (that's how I met him,) because one person couldn't possibly keep up with the training at all times. One person cant possibly keep up with the care and training of a wild animal! Older Chimpanzees become erratic


According to the Jane Goodall Institute:

Aggression is a natural aspect of chimpanzee behavior and it is not uncommon for chimps to bite each other in the wild. Even the best cared for chimpanzee innately misses the companionship of other chimpanzees and may act aggressively towards owners. However much a misguided chimp owner continues to love his or her "child," the chimpanzee will be too dangerous to keep as part of the family. Many owners, to delay the inevitable day that the chimp will have to be removed from the house, will pull the chimp's teeth, put on shock collars — even remove thumbs in the mistaken notion that this will make it impossible for the chimp to climb the drapes.

This morning on the Today Show a couple was interviewed who survived a Chimpanzee attack. This is a responsible couple who wished dearly that they could have kept their Chimp, but who put him in a facility when he got older. They were attacked at the facility while visiting by other chimps who had gotten loose. As kind as they are about Chimps in general, and as gracious as they are in saying that they sorely wish they could have one living with them so as to study it, the injuries speak for themselves. This guy isn't even done with the surgeries and care he needs. He threw himself in front of his wife, apparently and saved her.

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Heaven knows that I am an animal person who has been known to have a menagerie of pets that some people wouldn't want. The city was quick to sue me for a noise complaint from a disgruntled neighbor who was trying to sell his house and who had left by the time we went to trial. I won the suit, but had remedied the temporary problem, (too many roosters here from a clutch of eggs,) much earlier, anyway. Still the machinery of the process for noise complaints went into action, and once it was moving, lets just say that I became very familiar with the health department and the courts (and all is fine with my set up, thank-you-very-much.) How is it possible that a city like Stamford could be so remiss in protecting its citizens, even after incidents pointed to the out of control nature of the situation?

Charla Nash lost her face, her hands, and maybe her life. Mothers pushing baby carriages in neighborhoods of million dollar houses who used to worry about the odd frightened coyote up here, have to now worry about what else is behind those overgrown patches here and there. I'd like to know what Mayor Malloy intends to do to assure us that animal control and the department of health has permits and knowledge of all exotics residing in this quickly growing area before we have another tragedy.

Update:
I skipped over the part where the state had allowed Travis to be grandfathered in after permitting laws for exotic pets were passed in 2004. This family had Travis since 1994, which was all the more reason for a permit to be required in 2004, considering what is basic common knowledge about Chimpanzees. In other words, you don't need a PhD in primate psychology to know that they become aggressive. It might have been helpful if some animal regulating body was overseeing this thing. But with the apparent misunderstanding of the serious dangers to the public of keeping primates in substandard housing, I don't know if it would have made a difference.

The law enacted in 2004 exempted primates weighing less than 50 lbs, (as if a 50 lb monkey can't do some serious damage,) and those owned previously. Governor Rell now says that she is willing to consider an all out ban on owning primates as pets, but what seems to have fallen between the cracks here is that the primates that need looking at are the older ones that have been owned for a long time. Granted, no individual has applied for a large primate permit in the state since the law passed in 2004, but that doesn't mean that there aren't pre-existing primates out there that pose a danger. It would serve the entire country for animal control to require some sort of registration of primates, especially large ones. It would also serve to require that owners of these primates be licensed, and required to keep handy, animal tranquilizing darts.

c/p RIP Coco

And you thought YOUR business was getting clobbered

Imagine being the owner of THIS place.

(If you eat anything that might have even been in the same room with a peanut, you'd better check it out. I keep Kashi TLC bars in my office for light breakfast, and sure enough -- the two flavors I like are both recalled.

More on the Republican laissez-faire economics that allowed Peanut Corporation of America to operate the way it did here.

I hope we don't start seeing more of this

I react more strongly to stories like this than some people do, because of my first-hand experience in dealing with the aftermath of a murder by a man with financial problems. When John List killed his family in 1971, it was an unusual story. When a Bergen County man killed his two sons and himself in 2006, it was still unusual. I fear that as the American economy collapses, stories like this will become more prevalent:

An unemployed man with an advanced finance degree who was despondent over his own financial problems shot and killed his wife, three children, mother-in-law and then himself in an upscale home in a gated community, police said Monday.

Officers found the bodies Monday morning after the wife failed to show up at a neighbor's home to go to work, Deputy Chief Michel Moore said. The deaths occurred sometime after Saturday evening.

A handgun that had been bought Sept. 16 was found in the father's grasp, Moore said. Karthik Rajaram, 45, left two suicide notes — one for police and one for friends and relatives — and a will.

The notes attest to Rajaram's financial difficulties, and he takes responsibility for killing his family members, Moore said.

Officers found the mother-in-law, Indra Ramasesham, 69, dead in bed on the first floor. Upstairs, they found a 19-year-old son, Krishna Rajaram, dead in bed in the master bedroom.

The gunman's 39-year-old wife, Subasri, was found in another room, also apparently shot while sleeping, Moore said.

In an adjoining room, a 12-year-old son, Ganesha, was dead on the floor, and his 7-year-old brother, Arjuna, was dead in bed. Coroner's assistant chief Ed Winter said the victims were shot multiple times.

Rajaram had a master's of business administration in finance, formerly worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers and Sony Pictures, but had been unemployed for several months, Moore said.

Moore did not specify what financial trouble the man had been in. He noted that the family did not own the home.

We've built an entire society around consumerism. We've encouraged people to go into debt to buy more house than they need, more house than they can afford. Motor vehicle companies created leases so that people could drive more luxurious cars than they could afford otherwise. Suddenly everyone was entitled to the trappings of wealth -- the mansion and the luxury car and the 5-star Caribbean vacation every year. And now the rug has been pulled out from under us, and these people are left with nothing but debt and dashed dreams, in a country where the acquisition of STUFF is the only value.

What does it say about us that the thought of living with less is enough to make people suicidal?