Looking at the News that Matters to Us
By Josh Resnek
The tragic death by drug overdose of the young Kennedy girl at the compound on Cape Cod caused a spate of articles to be written that went something like this: that being a Kennedy is tough, tougher than say being any one of us.
As an older person and a longtime fan of the Kennedy’s, a read of those articles made me think.
How is being a Kennedy any tougher than being me or you or any of us?
Is it harder being a working-class Everett kid struggling to establish a place in the world for yourself or is it harder being a millionaire Kennedy marinated in money and privilege?
Good question isn’t it?
Is it harder coping with our lives if we don’t have privilege and millions upon millions of dollars or is it harder coping because of having millions and privilege?
The answer to this, I think, is simple.
It is harder struggling for money, reaching deep into our pockets to pay a succession of bills that never end, than it is having millions and not a care in the world about fiscal responsibility.
Those of us who were not lucky enough to be born a Kennedy have to work for a living, have to remain always responsible to ourselves and our kids. We just can’t all go to Africa and build houses for indigenous people or roam the earth exploring it without responsibility until we end up at the family compound on Cape Cod where we die of an overdose of drugs when we are 22.
The Kennedy girl’s death is a tragedy of the first order whether you are a Kennedy or not a Kennedy.
But to assert that it is harder being a Kennedy than it is say being a Resnek or any of us for that matter is to reduce this young woman’s death to a post script to bad writing.
We are all the same in the eyes of God. We are all made equal – and this formula doesn’t change because of the size of our bank accounts or the fame of our family members.
It is easier being rich than it is being poor.
It is preferred to have your stomach full instead of being empty. Privilege benefits those who are privileged.
Privilege such as the Kennedy’s experience is unknown to most of us mortals.
We might as well live in different worlds.
In the end, for this young Kennedy girl, all the money and privilege, all the fame of the family ended up being a liability for her instead of an advantage.
This is the tragedy of her death at 22.
She had everything…and she gave it away.
What would she have done if hadn’t been born a Kennedy?
Truant Officer Needed for Mayor’s Office
The mayor is busy creating a new squad of truant officers for the school department.
It is believed he is appointing or has already chosen 9 truant officers and a superintendent of truant officers who will be paid $84,000 a year. The affable Eddie Mastracola is to be the new superintendent as we understand it.
We haven’t spoken with Eddie but if we did, we’d tell him this: put a truant officer in the mayor’s office to detail when he is there and when he is not.
Good idea, don’t you think?
The mayor is absent from city hall about 150-200 days a year.
By his own admission, the mayor is always on the job because he carries his cell phone with him.
For instance, during his now 3 week vacation to Italy, following his ten day vacation to Hawaii, he has been absent from the city.
But by carrying his cell phone with him, he claims to be working, 24/7.
Funny how this kind of thinking works seamlessly for the mayor, who has designed a workless existence for himself while getting paid to vacation as much as he wants all the time.
The lawyers we’ve asked believe it is illegal for the mayor to be paid for vacations with his city salary which is designed exclusively to pay him for his work.
In other words, when the mayor cashes a paycheck while vacationing in Italy, he is being paid city money meant to reimburse him for his labor. The mayor has made a mockery out of cashing checks intended as pay for his labor when in fact he is being paid to be on a near perpetual vacation.
The mayor laughs off these type of reasonings.
He considers this an attack on his good name – that he should be allowed to do whatever he wants because he is the mayor.
In the real world, it doesn’t happen this way.
In the world of Kickback Carlo, where he wants to be rewarded for his service, all the vacation days in the world aren’t enough to satisfy his greed and his jealousy of others who have more than he does.
As for having a truant officer inside his corner office at city hall detailing when the mayor is there and chasing him down wherever he is when he is not…can you imagine the report he or she would file!!!!!
More Dangerous than ever Before Being an Everett cop or first Responder
The two recent mass shootings were stopped and one of the shooters killed by police officers carrying pistols facing lunatics carrying automatic weapons and wearing body armor!
If you are a first responder and you are facing a lunatic with an automatic weapon and you are facing the shooter with a pistol, you might as well be holding a BB Gun, so great is the difference in fire power.
Yet in both incidents – in El Paso and in Ohio, police officers subdued one of the shooters and killed the other at great risk to themselves.
It is impossible to recreate the fear and the terror police officers feel when responding to such events vastly out of sync with the firepower they are facing.
For the first guys ands gals in uniform to arrive, it is almost a suicide effort to subdue those shooting wildly with automatic weapons – and yet in Ohio – they killed the shooter just as he was preparing to enter a crowded club.
Such acts of heroism go way beyond our ability to comprehend them.
Locally, our police officers face the same situation if such a sick shooting scene develops.
If you think police officers are paid too much money for what they are asked and required to do, you better think again.
No amount of money is worth facing a lunatic with an automatic weapon killing people randomly.
No amount of money makes the situation fair when a police officer carrying a department issue revolver faces a murderer carrying an automatic weapon.
The heroism of the first responders in El Paso and Ohio is over the top, way beyond the call of duty.
Thank God there are people wearing the blue willing to put their lives on the line for us when the chips are down.