By Chris Powell
Most shootings in Hartford are followed by rallies by Mothers United Against Violence at the scenes of the crimes. The shootings two weeks ago were especially atrocious, the victims being a 20-year-old woman and her infant son, killed in what police said was a dispute over a car, with the young perpetrator fleeing to Puerto Rico but quickly apprehended there.
The rallies always feature appeals to the “community” to stop the violence, as well as a hand-wringing harangue by a street preacher. They often get a couple of minutes on local television newscasts. But what exactly do the rally participants want everyone else to do? They don’t say, and the perpetrators aren’t listening.
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The rallies serve only to make their participants feel relevant and the TV stations feel as if they have covered the story when they haven’t even touched it.
At least the rally-goers notice the violence. These days even the atrocities in the cities pass without comment from the governor, state legislators, and other leaders, who behave, along with journalism, as if the social disintegration sweeping Connecticut but worst in the cities is the natural order of things.
It wasn’t always this way. Indeed, historians say that a century ago Hartford was the richest and finest city in the country. Today atrocities like the murder of the young woman and her baby seldom occur outside the cities, an indication that society somehow can be arranged to prevent them in other places.
People in authority in Connecticut may claim to be trying to reduce the atrocities, but their frequency indicates that whatever they are doing isn’t working any better than those hapless rallies of lamentation and hand-wringing. Government’s failure to stop social disintegration wasn’t even an issue in last month’s state election and isn’t on the agenda for the session of the General Assembly that will convene in a few weeks, though if people listen closely enough the gunshots sometimes can be heard from the grounds of the state Capitol.
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RACISM DIDN’T ELECT TRUMP: Many Democrats, including some in Connecticut, are inadvertently signifying that people tend to see and hear only what they want to. These Democrats claim that Donald Trump has just been elected president for a second time because so many voters are racist and bigoted against women and as a result voted against the Democratic nominee for president, Vice President Kamala Harris, a mixed-race woman in an interracial marriage.
Of course some voters always will be racist and bigoted. But last week the nonprofit survey organization DataHaven reported that it recently polled more than 7,400 people throughout Connecticut and 40% said they are struggling financially. More people said they are worse off than they were a year ago than said they are better off.
A few weeks ago similar surveys by the United Way and Connecticut Voices for Children reported alarming increases in poverty in the state.
Connecticut is solidly Democratic but in the election last month Trump substantially increased his share of the vote in the state, even in the overwhelmingly Democratic cities. Are even many Democrats racist and misogynist?
Or might the sharp economic decline found by those surveys and others around the country have had more to with the results of the election? While some Democratic leaders acknowledge that their party has lost touch with the working class, few admit the possibility that their party’s last four years in charge of the federal government worsened living standards.
Trump may end the U.S. proxy war with Russia in Ukraine even as he makes America nuts again in other respects, as with tariffs and more deficits and inflation. But he is going back to the White House because most voters thought he would be better than the current administration, and no one seems more out of touch on this point than Connecticut’s just re-elected U.S. senator, Chris Murphy.
Last week Murphy told an interviewer, “I’m spending most of my time preparing for dystopia,” as if most voters hadn’t already seen enough dystopia under the senator’s own party.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 
Great column, always on point.
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