Monday, July 31, 2006
Tourist killed during Fla. robbery
This is an interesting headline. It seems to somehow differentiate between the murder of a tourist and the murder of a non-tourist. Is it somehow better or worse that it was a tourist who was killed and not a local citizen or somebody visiting on business?
It's as if, it's a worse crime because it was a tourist who was shot - that it makes it special somehow. How many non-tourists do you suppose were killed in Florida around the same time. Is it so common that it doesn't really matter anymore when a local gets killed? It's like it's OK somehow to kill locals, but it's much worse to kill someone who isn't from the area. I don't get it. It's like "innocent because of insanity" - as if any murder is done by sane people? Or that for some reason a murder during a "hate crime" is any worse than a run-of-the-mill murder. A problem seems to be that murders are becoming so common, we need to come up with more ways to define them.
I suppose looking at it deeper, it is really worse because it's a tourist. Let's face it, there's places in almost every area where you shouldn't go unless you have a specific, and probably less than legal, reason for going there. Locals know that and tourists don't. Here in Saginaw, if you get just outside of "downtown" on the east side, you're putting your life into someone else's hands. You go downtown looking for the Castle Museum or Hoyt library and make a wrong turn or two and you're in the middle of gangland central Saginaw. Nothing like South Central LA, mind you, but bad enough. I went to visit Wayne State University in Detroit a few years ago and took an exit only one or maybe two stops too far south - I thought I entered the set for Omega Man. Talk about an urban wasteland. I even took an exit one block south of where I'd hoped to get off in Saginaw a couple of years ago. This was late at night - and this time it was as if I'd entered the set for some cheap zombie gang movie where a crowd came out of nowhere and started to approach my car. I'm not ashamed to say, I allegedly ran a couple of stop signs on my way north to calmer pastures. The unknown is always spookier.
