If you meet certain criteria than full moral relativism kicks in...

December 16, 2019

For Tessa Majors, ever newer and more creative ways of blaming the victim

By Monica Showalter

I'm starting to watch the reaction to this Tessa Majors murder case like a slo-mo car crash.
I noted the other day that the New York Times was pretty obnoxious to the Barnard College (Columbia Unversity) student who was murdered in a dangerous park outside the Columbia campus, largely by trying to define victim's entire life by her green hair and liking for punk rock, as if kids don't go through stages. Kind of harsh to define someone that way at the grand sendoff...
And far from being 'worldly' as the Times quoted someone as saying, those kinds of things are childish, and yes, the victim was in fact very young and naive. Next up, the police union chief had to throw in that she had been in the park to buy marijuana. Was that an absolute fact? Not a nice thing to say if it wasn't. And if it was, was this the time to bring it up? Punk rock, green hair, pot, somehow a pretty wretched victim was being substituted for a bright young thing who shouldn't have been killed no matter what the circumstances. 
Mayor Bill de Blasio of all people, once again was the guy who said the right thing, calling out the police union chief "heartless" on that one, given that it was pretty inappropriate. He said the right things earlier, too, which is kind of startling.
But the cop's bid to pile onto the victim was far from the most obnoxious thing out there for her

The local leftists held a memorial for Majors, and there the moral relativism achieved some incredible heights. 
Here's the first one from a local leftist pol:

I know that when we learned that the suspects — and they are suspects, let’s not assume anything — that the suspects were only 13 and 14 that it only compounded this tragedy,” Councilman Mark Levine said. “Families were destroyed on both sides of this horrible crime. We have failed not just Tess but the families of this community as well.”

Two victims? Nope, one dead person means one victim. Calling the killers equivalent to the victim is pretty revolting all by itself.
There also was this:

Councilman Ydanis Rodríguez echoed Levine’s sentiment that children on the Harlem side of the park, where poverty is most predominant were failed by a lack of after school programming and other measures that circumvent children entering the criminal justice system.
“If it turns out to be 13 and 14 year olds, we’ve all failed,” Rodríguez said.

So a lack of after-school programs turns kids into killers? How on earth did humanity survive before after-school programs? This is clearly the mentality of people who view the state as responsible for raising kids. And the real question that lurks on the flip side of that idiotic statement is where the heck were these kids' parents?  "We've all failed"? Including young Tessa who got knifed? Her, too? Nope, someone, like maybe an indifferent mother or an absent father, is who failed, and if the kids had any sense of right or wrong at all anyway, then they failed, too. Blaming the entire community for the outrageous deeds of some young criminals who apparently had been plaguing their neighborhood for a long time without consequences is kind of rich.
There also was this:

One Harlem resident said she did not feel “healed” by the vigil, claiming elected officials leading the event should have offered the mic to other members of the community. Others in the crowd grumbled similar sentiments as the vigil speakers traded turns at the podium.

Which, combined with the delicately put paragraph at the bottom about the Harlem residents' sentiment about the importance of the police not rushing the investigation, rather suggests that some members from the Harlem side (probably not the people who were being robbed by the little gangsters and trying to get the cops to pick them up) don't particularly want this crime punished, sounding as though they think the victim had it coming. Offer the mic to the "other members of the community," meaning, the ones on the killers' side? Like there are two points of view here? It sounds like someone's got a dog in this fight. Opposing murder ought to be an easy one for all members of the "community" to agree on.
This is clearly shaping up to something just a little ugly. 
It's rather the first outlines of an Al Sharpton-style racialist matter, with Tessa on track to be the victim a second time. Undoubtedly we will hear more from this crowd, trying to blame the victim. So now we have the Times, the cop union chief, the local leftists, and these unnamed Harlem residents all weighing in with something negative for Tessa and something exculpatory for the atmosphere she was in. It sounds like she's going to be dragged through the mud as this drama plays out. Does she really have to be killed a second time?
Image credit: Twitter screen shot