Too much hate with my morning coffee
Today I made a wonderful breakfast of homemade blueberry-walnut waffles with Vermont maple syrup and hot coffee. Despite the obvious snub to carb-counters, I would have enjoyed my breakfast if I hadn’t decided to read the paper with it. In a few minutes, I read about a man, who was on probation for raping a five-year-old girl in August, and was now accused of raping his girlfriend’s three-year old girl during an overnight visit last weekend. (Part of the evidence collected is the girl’s pull-up diaper she wore to bed.) Then I read about a man accused of shooting an off-duty firefighter due to road rage. This man, whose father is a prominent Quincy businessman, and his family are no strangers to the courts with an uncle convicted in 2003 of negligent homicide in a friend’s death during a boating accident. The uncle got six months probation for boating while drunk, which seems excessively light although I don’t know the details of the case. The last story was about a father who is being charged with beating to death his seven-year-old son on Father’s Day. At that point, I closed the paper, noticed how chilly my kitchen felt despite the sun forcefully streaming in the windows, and realized I felt queasy, even sick to my stomach. Perhaps it was the sugary sweetness of syrup so early in the day, but I think it was the extreme dosage of hate and violence with my morning cup of coffee.