Have you seen TV stories about horrible things that occur in certain communities and people always say on camera, “I never expected that to happen where I live”
Give your head a shake, anything can happen in any community any area any time. There are “NO” safe areas. If the creeps that do these things want an area to do it in they travel from their bad area to do it in the area that thinks they are a “good” area.
Someone tell me why people always say I never expected it to happen in my area ?
If I may play devil’s advocate, I can see how people can be shocked and make these statements. I was born and raised in a sleepy little community where nothing really horrible ever was committed by or visited upon our neighbors. I lived there for 24 years and got to know most of my neighbors quite well; I even called several of them Grandma and Grandpa, or Aunt and Uncle, even though they were in no way related to me. So if one day we found that Mr. A shot and killed his neighbor Mr. B over a dispute, or Mr. C’s house was firebombed by a disgruntled employee, or Mrs. D had been found in the family’s basement freezer after supposedly taking an extended vacation to visit family, the community would have been suitably shocked and more than one of us would probably have uttered the phrase in question.
I’ve lived in Dallas, OR, for just over a year now. Growing up, I always thought this was a sleepy little community, too (it’s less than 20 miles from my previous home). But within months of moving here, one neighbor boy accidentally killed his cousin while playing “war” with a homemade missile, and another murdered his parents and had a friend help him dispose of the bodies in the woods. Yes, I didn’t think these things could happen in my neighborhood. I’m a little wiser now, but if someone had shoved a television camera in my face when these events occured and asked me what I thought, I probably would have said that, too.
“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy
The creeps don’t always travel from the bad areas to the good areas, either. A lot of them lived in the good areas to begin with. I grew up in Reading, Massachusetts; population 22,000; 97.9% white; per capita income: $24,500; average home value: $204,000. Here’s a few things that happened in my town in the past few decades:
circa 1974: A fourteen year old boy lured his girlfriend into the woods (behind my friend’s house, no less), strangled her to death, dowsed her body with gasoline, and set her on fire. Her charred remains were found days later.
circa 1981: A group of seventh and eighth grade boys (some of whom I knew) gang raped an eighth grade girl in the woods behind the junior high school one afternoon. They claimed that “she wanted it.”
1989: A man from my town shot his 8-month-pregnant wife in the head while they sat in their parked car after attending a birthing class in Boston. He, apparantly, was after her life insurance money. He told the police that they were attacked by a mysterious black assailant. After several months, the police finally caught onto him (although not before wrongly arresting a black man who fit the bogus description) and he committed suicide by jumping off the Tobin Bridge in Boston. Some of you might have heard about that one.
circa 1997: A woman from my town mysteriously dissappeared, leaving her car behind at a local shopping center. For weeks afterwards, her husband made tearful pleas on the news for her return, offered money for any information about her disappearance, led a group of volunteers on a search of the area, etc. After a month, or so, the police grew suspicious of the husband when he was seen disposing of a blood-stained mattress and buying a large Rubbermaid container at a hardware store. Finally, the woman’s decomposing body was found hidden behind some boxes in the couple’s basement.
“For what a man had rather were true, he more readily believes” - Francis Bacon
I agree with Gr8. When you get used to a certain “stable” status, as it was in G’s little community, anything that interrupts it shocks you.
I know that the longer things stay a certain way, the closer they get to change, but we are NOT educated that way.
My parents never told me something like: “it’s been three months since you flunked a subject, better get ready to screw up!”
And it is also true that in certain communities, crime rates are lower than in other places.
Yes, I know that. But what if you are a 15 year old living in a place where nothing outrageous has happened in 24 years (like in Gr8’s town)? Experience tells you to EXPECT things to stay that way, although we know that “shit happens”. If there is a high probability for things to remain peaceful and quiet, and that peace is interrupted by a random event, what are you going to say? “I knew it was going to happen, sooner or later”?
A meteorite could hit you any time, can’t it? But I don’t think you wouldn’t be shocked if a big chunk of rock and metal from space destroys your car “in the middle of the day”.
Salud!
Men will cease to commit atrocities only when they cease to believe absurdities.
-Voltaire
Last week I was fixing my landlord’s computer and we were just chatting and he said, “So, did you hear the shootout earlier?” I asked “What shootout?” and he said, “Oh, somebody robbed a bank over in Fairfield and took a hostage and ended up in a shootout the next block over from us.”
I thought he was joking, but no - it actually happened. I never thought it COULDN’T happen here - I just figured you’d have to be incredibly stupid or on drugs, 'cause we’re on an ISLAND and the getaway might get complicated.
(It was the latter, by the way - Mr. Bankrobber had resurrected his heroin habit.)
I live in a fairly small town, and the area i live in is mostly rural. None of the cities are over 100,000 in population and most are 5 - 20 miles apart. When several big things have happened here, I never said “I can"t believe that happened here!” For instance some shocking things that have happened here:
Last year a twelve year old girl was abducted, and murdered. The FBI didnt find her body until months after she was taken (you might have heard of the case, the girl was Christina Willams)
Also last year another twelve year old girl was stabbed to death by her neighbor.He was in the process of robbing the girls house when the girl found him.
There have been several jewelry heists here
Numerous gang shootings in the area
Two women were shot by a loony psychotic 17 year old boy who was a part of a gang. His accomplice was someone who i had met through a friend many years ago. Supposedly they laughed after doing their deeds.
A respected highschool counselor i think strangled his wife and hid her body in the trunk of his car, while he tried to find a place to dump her body.
Now, most of these things would shock people in small towns and rural areas.With all of those things, i just never think that anything is too shocking to happen here. Now, i do understand why others may say that. If you live in a place that has gone many years without any major crimes, you do expect things to stay as they are. When things change like that, its such a shock that people are baffled as to why it would happen all of a sudden.
When they say, “I thought it couldn’t happen here”, I think that it ALWAYS happens here, it just depends on where the here is. Does that make sense to anyone?
“On the edge of sleep, I awoke to a sun so bright…”
Seems to me that most of the really wierd stuff happens in smaller towns or in the suburbs. At least thats the feeling I get from the news.
Maybe I should check the stats before I make such broad generalizations, but I posted this on impulse.
But you know what I’m talking about. The mutilations, the feeding relatives to chickens, the keeping of your ex’s head in the fridge. School shootings. Stuff like that.
Peace,
mangeorge
Work like you don’t need the money…
Love like you’ve never been hurt…
Dance like nobody’s watching! Source???
May I switch gears? Why do disaster survivors always thank God for being spared? What about the other 399 passengers that went down in flames? Personally, I would think that God just missed me.
There is no course of life so weak and sottish as that which is managed by order, method, and discipline. -Montaigne
Sounds like something Chris Rock said once. (paraphrasing) “If you hear on the news about a guy who killed someone with a gun, there’s a pretty good chance it was a black guy. But if you hear about some guy who killed someone with a chainsaw, ate their eyeballs, and stored the carcass in the freezer, it was definitely a white guy.”
I’ve always wondered about that, too. After the Martin Luther King Day earthquake in '94, I met a woman who told me she’d been in LA over the Christmas holidays and had only just got back to Oregon about a week before the quake, and that some of the roads that were destroyed in the quake were roads that she’d traveled over frequently during her stay down there. But, since the earthquake didn’t hit until after she was home in Oregon, she kept repeating, “God is merciful. God is merciful.” I kept wanting to mention that the people who lost their home and/or family to the quake might beg to differ.
“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy
Dark humor, to be sure, but to see a good parody on this affect go to The Onion (http://www.theonion.com) and look through the archives for the story “Parents of Suicide Victim Saw it Coming A Mile Away”.
(Warning–if you’ve never read “The Onion”, you’ll be here all afternoon.)
Dark humor, to be sure, but to see a good parody on this effect go to The Onion (http://www.theonion.com) and look through the archives for the story “Parents of Suicide Victim Saw it Coming A Mile Away”.
(Warning–if you’ve never read “The Onion”, you’ll be here all afternoon.)
Mark Mal, how can anyone afford a house where you live? An income of $24,500 and houses that cost $204,000 seems a bit off. You could never do that where I live, you wouldn’t qualify for the loan! And Mangeorge, I’m with you on the sickos!
Just an observation - The people who make such statements (I didn’t think it could happen here) usually include a description of the perp, “He was a quiet guy” or “they were just a quiet, typical family.” Makes me wonder just what the hell is going on next door here, what with the newspapers plastered inside all the windows! (Don’t mind me, I grew up about 5 miles from John Wayne Gacy’s house. While he was practicing).
I was looking at another message board yesterday (don’t call me an infidel!) and right in the subject line of one messages was a banner ad for a web page called “Whites Only,” which, unfortunately, automatically forwarded the user of the message board to that page. I’ve seen “This Week in Hate” on the Daily Show, so I admit morbid curiousity got the better of me (especially when every time I tried to return to the mb, I would automatically be forwarded back to the Whites Only page–I finally mentioned it to the web master of the mb who had no idea the banner had been posted there and it was removed). Still nothing could have prepared me for what I saw there. (I didn’t think it could happen on this internet!)
Anyway, this is slightly relevant to the quote above (though not at all to the OP), so bear with me… I only looked at one article while on this page and was suitably horrified. It was a reprint of a newspaper article about a black couple who murdered their baby, put parts of it in battery acid to disintegrate it, and batter dipped and fried the rest of it for the dog. The poster of this page went on to suggest that if this is how black people treat their own children, what do they have in store for white children?
I’m not going to bother trying to refute this, you all know why it’s an utterly preposterous statement, and it’s too agonizingly awful for me to think about any more. I’m just going to say that I’ve heard of plenty of white children being maimed and killed by white people, even their own parents.
Hope I didn’t ruin any one else’s day.
“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy
The study of filtering is nothing less than the study of psychology. Which impressions are filtered out and which are permitted to take hold largely determines our personality. More narrowly construed as the phenomenon whereby vivid & personalized events are remembered and their incidence therefore overestimated, the so called Jean Dixon effect often seems to lend support to bogus medical, diet, gambling, psychic & pseudoscientific claims.
A defense against this judgmental bias is to look at bald numbers to provide some perspective. Remember that rarity in itself leads to publicity, making rare events appear commonplace. Terrorist kidnappings & cyanide poisonings are given monumental coverage, with profiles of the distraught families, etc., yet the number of deaths due to smoking is roughly the equivalent of three fully loaded jumbo jets crashing each & every day of the year.
In some of those sleepy towns you’ve mentioned, the appearance of a random street lunatic would probably grab the headlines of the morning paper. Here in DC, I consider it newsworthy if a day goes by that I don’t see such people on the streets. It all depends on what you’re accustomed to.