Nobody feels this more keenly than William Murchison.

I don’t sign at the end of my post. That is the sole duty of one Marty Cortland.

I will forward your comment to him, once he clears it with the CIA, the FBI and “the old guy in the sky”, your request is certain to be taken care of.

In the interim…

Love,
Jack E. Jett
Scientologist, providing beards for homosexual men since 1974

No need to sign your name at the end of posts since there is a field that requires a name when you post. BTW, it’s a visible field. Thanks

Tim’s right of course. Our world, Dallas, Texas USA, wasn’t a better place forty years ago than it is today. Well, if you were a white male I guess in a perverted kind of way you could look at it and feel, er, ah, well, better. After all, you didn’t have to compete with minorities or women for the good jobs.

The one thing I’ve noticed about the good old days is it’s rare you hear about them from those who were adults during that period. No. It’s usually the kids and the good old days is more of a statement against forced adulthood than it is better times.

Crime will always be with us. Heck, forty years ago this minute I was in the military serving in a combat zone in a War that’s since been shown to have been for all the wrong reasons. That’s criminal, for fifty eight thousand of our finest back then, criminally fatal.

Jack Jett

Far from not being outraged at the incident Murchison wrote about, I am outraged that HE is just NOW outraged and realizing what is going on, because only now is it close to home and thus real to him. In a ‘good’ vs. a ‘bad’ neighborhood where one gets ‘what they pay for’ and are thus ‘asking for it’? Because this attack is on a lovely white professional woman rather than a brown brick layer or a black fry cook?

How fortunate Murchison is to just now be appalled. Far more fortunate, for starters, than the gay men who in that Oak Lawn/Uptown area have been routinely attacked and beaten…even killed… for years and years because someone wanted to and simply ‘could’. And, I might add, get away with it for decades because they had no advocates, no publicity, no sense that they too were ‘normal’ people doing ‘normal’ things in their ‘normal’ lives.

I had one friend attacked behind the Stoneleigh (near this very incident 20 years later) where he lived in the 80s, who was never the same. Loss of hearing, long rehab, slurred speech, compromised corporate career; scars both real and imagined. His attack never made the paper. If it had, I am sure Murchison would have written his disillusioned outrage about it, yes?

So as for me, both on a personal level and a professional one as an also Op-Ed ViewPoints contributor to the DMN, I was asking William Murchison, among other things; where the hell have you been?

Drumming up 40 year old stories serves no purpose. The same can be said of comparing the Little Mexico/Coon Town of the 1960’s with the contemporary Uptown it replaced. That entire area was a red light district of whorehouses, seedy bars and organized street crime. The current Uptown of fresh faced Dallasites living in expensive condos and driving German sportscars is far removed from what used to be there. Trying to draw a parallel between the two is an exercise in stupidity.

Are so many of you that jaded? Does an attack on a woman in broad daylight not even get your hackles raised?

I’m furious that criminals can wage a war on normal people trying to live their normal lives. Even just using the little fishbowl of the Katy Trail as an example, violent crime has increased quite a bit in the last year or two. In the first 4-5 years after it was built I never heard or read of any crime there. Now there is a savage beating, stabbing or robbery there every couple months. I think that Mr. Murchison was spot on that society in general is on a downward slide.

Even just yesterday, Saturday afternoon, on the way down to White Rock Lake with my wife and dog, we witnessed a man attack a DPD officer on Fisher Road, a block from the lake. During the street fight she was shoved off down a steep creek embankment into a culvert near the Mockingbird Bridge and was injured.

After seeing something like that, you wonder what is wrong with people, how you could be next, how maybe Dallas really is not the safe place people make believe it to be.

Maybe some of you armchair internet commandos need to have your own reality check and have your own intimate encounter with some thug before you understand how bad things really are.