By Chris Powell
While state government is all geared up to distract itself with trivia, news organizations are full of reports indicating Connecticut’s worsening impoverishment, especially its child neglect. In recent days these reports have told of thousands of students coming to school hungry because their families don’t feed them at home, and of a city school system — Waterbury’s — that is making around-the-clock tutoring available to students, 80% of whom are described as “high needs,” a euphemism for neglected.
Of course poverty in Waterbury or any city isn’t a surprise, but the report about it added that more than half of [ITALICS] all [END ITALICS] students in Connecticut are now classified by the state Education Department as “high needs.”
News reports always indicate that most of Connecticut’s needy are unmarried women with children whose fathers play little if any role in their lives. But no one in authority draws a connection between this phenomenon and the poverty, child neglect, and drug abuse afflicting the schools and criminal justice.
One of the recent reports, drawing from the state Sentencing Commission, says 80% of Connecticut’s prison inmates are mentally ill or suffer from drug abuse. Those have been the circumstances in the prisons for decades, since many “high needs” children become higher-needs offenders over time.
Unless their neglect is reversed early, “high needs” children enter adulthood without a strong basic education and are qualified only for menial work, highly susceptible to the temptations of drugs and crime, and unable to contribute much if anything to society.
But there is no plan to transform the lives of Connecticut’s neglected children or even to acknowledge their neglect and its causes. Instead legislators are offering only the usual pandering and empty gestures.
State Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, has introduced a bill to prohibit people convicted of sedition, rebellion, or insurrection from holding public office or any government job.
Connecticut hasn’t run into that problem yet, but just down the road from Norwalk, in Bridgeport, Joe Ganim has been serving his second stint as mayor after having done a long prison term for corruption committed during his first stint. No state law prevented his return to office.
Now Ganim is even seeking to recover his license to practice law.
But, like Duff, Ganim is a Democrat, so distant “insurrectionists” can be used to distract from the taint upon government close to home.
State Rep. Christopher Rosario, D-Bridgeport, proposes to authorize the two Indian casinos in the southeastern part of the state, as well as a few bars in the state’s cities, to sell alcoholic beverages as late as 4 in the morning, even as wrong-way driving has exploded in Connecticut and has just killed one of Rosario’s legislative colleagues and even as state-authorized marijuana will increase driving while intoxicated.
More pandering to the Indians comes from the bill introduced by Rep. Anthony Nolan, D-New London, to rename the Thames River as the Pequot River, after the tribe that terrorized the rest of the inhabitants of Connecticut 400 years ago, causing the European settlers and the other Indian tribes to unite to destroy them. (“Pequot” itself meant “destroyers.”)
What possibly could justify the honor Nolan proposes? Only the great wealth of the distant descendants of the Pequots who now operate one of the casinos. Government awarded them a spectacularly valuable duopoly and now humiliates itself before them.
Governor Lamont offered the most trivial proposals of the month as he claimed to be seeking “to eliminate gun violence.”
He would “invest” another $2.5 million in “community violence intervention programs,” whereby unstable young men are asked nicely to behave. He would prohibit carrying guns openly in public, as if criminals don’t already conceal their weapons until they strike. He would prohibit people from buying more than one handgun per month, as if nearly everyone who wants a gun doesn’t already have one. And he wants registration of “ghost guns,” as if criminals will comply.
Nothing proposed so far in the legislative session will impede gun violence or slow or even acknowledge Connecticut’s social disintegration.
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Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.
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Chris Powell column 