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Our Genovese

Tomorrow is always waiting on us, and in more ways than one.

We conspicuously consume resources that our children's children may one day need to survive, confident that they'll figure out how to live without them, and hopefully they'll do so with much less bloodshed than we've invested to keep them.

And we do this, while inconspicuously too many of us try not to choke on our pride for surrendering our responsibility to do anything about it.

We are the 38 bystanders who watched a psychopath brutally slice Kitty Genovese to death in 1964, who did little more than yell about it in their own living rooms, much as we all do, parked in front of our screen as we are, but not one of them was bothered enough by what they watched out their window that March 13th, at 3 a.m., to call the police.  And our window is our screens, which is also a mirror of us. 

And when you consider that studies have shown that an inordinate number of the top people people running everything are themselves psychopaths, the answer offered by the killer when he was apprehended, may explain how the psychopaths who are running everything see all of us.  For in an economic system governed by an ethos of "survival of the fittest," the harder one strives to become one, the more money they can expect to make, legally or illegally (which aren't as different as we are taught to believe).

When the killer was asked by the Chief of Detectives Albert Seedman why he dared to attack a woman in front of so many witnesses, the psychopath calmly replied,  "I knew they wouldn't do anything, people never do." To which he could've added, "They just like to watch."

Maybe that is the reason the American financier and railroad developer Jay Gould said he could "hire one half of the working class to kill the other half," because that was what we were already doing, and we have only gotten better at it. We just can't see that Soylent Green is actually money.

And our children are our Genovese.


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