On 10/24/2009 in Richmond, California, over 10 boys engaged in a 2 and a half hour long gang rape against a 15-year-old girl outside a California high school homecoming dance Saturday night. Shocking and disgusting.

The most tragic and disturbing part is as many as 20 people stood there watching without doing anything, some even laughing nearby with video cameras, as if they were watching a movie.

Richmond High student body is predominently Hispanics. What can we say about that high school and the people going there and their norms, values and culture, the culture that devalues their women to nothing but sex objects? Is it too much a prejudice to see this as a reflection of a sub-culture? What has made this part of humanity downgrade to this beastly low existence? I don’t have answer. I feel sad beyond words and deeply disturbed when I think of this poor girl.

“A US Army major has opened fire on fellow soldiers at the Fort Hood military base in Texas, killing 13 people and injuring 30,” according to officials, 11/5/2009.

As with any indiscriminate killing, this one is equally senseless and appalling, thundering out of blue sky. The irony is these soldiers were on their way to kill in a foreign land were stopped and killed by one of them in their homeland. We might never know the exact motive behind this extreme action, yet we do know this is not the first time killing takes place among army comrades and it is the second mass killing in two years. In fact, shootings on US land have been on the rise in recent years due to economic downturn aggravated by the wars.

The imminent departure for the battle zone might have sparked the ignition, but in this case many other contributing factors must have helped push beyond the limit of human sanity and worked together toward this violent outburst. This mass-shooting reminds me of the Virginia Tech shooting, also by a minority, Seung-Hui Cho, in 2007. And just as that shooting, there were some foreboding signs, which were shrugged off as insignificant until after the event.

—He was said to have “faced harassment over his ‘Middle Eastern ethnicity’ and had been trying to leave the army.”
—He “listed his birthplace as Arlington, Virginia, but his nationality as Palestinian” — identity issue.
—He “wanted out of the military, and they would not let him leave, even after he offered to repay.”
—He “did not make many friends” — a loner.
—He “often got into arguments with military colleagues who supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” — anti-war stand.

It is not just another mourning for the dead, but also another case, another statistics for psychologists, sociologist, criminologists and everyone of us to mull over in the years to come.

I can’t believe “Precious“, a rather morbid and pathetical movie, won a top prize at Toronto Film Festival. I see in the story the most horrible crime against children and the failure of the society to protect children from their bestial parents.

The movie is based on the 1996 novel Push by Sapphire, rated R(restricted) for child abuse including sexual assault, and pervasive language, to be released on 11/6/2009. The heroine, the lost and downtrodden in the world of real hell, has all the necessary ingredients of the most abject and wretched human existence, just like the 1982 novel Color Purple by Alice Walker.

The 16-year-old black protagonist growing up in Harlem is all of the following –
illiterate,
obese,
HIV positive,
giving birth to the first child when she was 12 years old,
pregnant again at 16, both made possible by her father,
dropping school during 9th grade because of pregnancy,
her father = drug addict, AIDS invalid, and started raping his daughter since she was three years old,
her mother = AIDS invalid, physically and mentally abuses her daughter,
all of them living off our dear Uncle Sam and your tax dollar.

The protagonist somehow was enlightened when she read The Color Purple. Yes, she finally found somebody whose miserable existence seems to match that of her own.

I must confess that I am not familiar with the culture and the kind of life depicted in the novel. Even though these social problems and issues do exist and demand our attention, I would think them as being fit topics for social workers, government, sociologists or anyone determined to make a change to that culture. It is more proper to be committed in the form of documentary film. It is definitely too disturbing as entertainment to the eyes and minds of normal people.

I cannot say what the social impact that the movie of crime against the children has to exert upon the viewers or the moral consciousness of the parents who live off raping their daughters or abusing their children. At any rate, this is a crime that needs to deal with not an entertainment for relaxation. Just wondering how Obama thinks of those African-American parents in the movie.

More than two years have passed since Rekha Kumari-Baker of Britain stabbed to death both of her innocent daughters, 16 and 13 years old, while they were sleeping in their beds, in retaliation to the mal-treatment of her ex-husband, David Baker. The shocking murder happened on 13 June 2007. She hated her husband so much that she stabbed at her two lovely daughters, 36-39 times each, making them real scapegoats for their father.

Though the killer mother has been recently found guilty, questions are lingering in people’s mind as to the ultimate reason behind this extremity of crime. What had happened to drive her into such an outrageous frenzy murder. I can see the going-on in the mind of David Baker — “I can treat you like a dog and you can do nothing about it.” But he underestimated his ex-wife’s havoc-wreaking ability.

This reminds me of Susan Smith who took the lives of her young children on the night of October 25, 1994, the date before my daughter came along. I am afraid most people now have either forgot it or never heard of it. My daughter, upon reading it, called them “the cruelest murder.”

A wise man knows not to hurt the mother of his child if he truly loves his child. A wise mother knows no matter what happens to her, the protection of her children is forever her priority. Alas, wise men are rare to find just as hysteric women are too often seen.

We all heard of the 9/8/09 death of Annie Le, 24-year-old Yale graduate, which happened 5 days before her planned wedding to her college boyfriend. She was found stuffed in the wall of a research center, having been suffocated to death. We might never know what exactly happened during the last moment of her life. For a parent, it doesn’t matter how a child dies because the weight of this fact is too heavy to bear.

At first, it came as a shock when it happened in an institution of such a high prestige with heavy layer of campus safety and extra “three levels of security to get into the basement of the lab building, including two swipes of a security card.” It happened even when the victim was cautious and trying to avoid becoming “yet another statistic.”

The murder reminds people of the death of Suzanne Jovin, the 21-year-old German Yale senior brutally murdered in 1998. Her death remains unsolved homicide cold case. We are not sure if this one is going to be one of the cold cases.

What can we say of these levels of security? If anything, they only provide an illusion of security, relaxing our vigilance, making people believe all is well within a secured place. I talked to my daughter, “There is absolutely no security every time you find yourself alone with another almost-a-stranger male. Do not harbor any illusion of security even with 10 levels.” Then the question still remains — how can we parents adequately prepare our children for college with violent crime like this?

CBS News.com, July 23, 2009 3:58 PM, “Thou Shall Not Steal: Rabbis Masterminded Money Laundering Ring, Say Feds,” posted by Neil Katz

MSNBC.com, updated 6:26 p.m. CT, Thurs., July 23, 2009, “44 arrested in N.J. corruption probe Suspects include rabbis, mayors; probe involved black-market kidneys.” By AP.

Washingtonpost.com, Friday, July 24, 2009; 6:40 AM, “Officials lambaste NJ corruption after 44 arrested,” by DAVID PORTER, The Associated Press.

New York Times, “44 Charged by U.S. in New Jersey Corruption Sweep, Agents led suspects from F.B.I. headquarters in Newark on Thursday. The inquiry began with questions on money laundering,” by David M. Halbfinger, 7/23/2009.

BBC news, “US corruption probe nets dozens, More than 40 people, including politicians, officials and several rabbis have been arrested in a major FBI operation in the US. Three hundred agents raided dozens of locations in New Jersey and New York as part of a 10-year probe into corruption and money laundering.”
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What happened to the politicians and religious leaders? Not close enough to law or to God? Not really. To be sure, it must be large enough to catch so much national or even global attention. The disturbing part is the offenders are supposed to exemplify their own moral teachings. The fact they knowingly transgressed the force of law and the teaching of their Bible makes the transgression especially unpardonable.

How can we explain the downfall of these powerful persons? Is it because the power of money is too great to resist even to these religious leaders? If that is the case, I am shuddered at the thought that my children someday in the future might be exposed to such temptation. Then again, with my constant nagging, I am sure my children know better than getting themselves into such a huge disgrace.

How young a person must be before a serious offense can be committed? We are kept being bombarded with shocking news of extreme cruelties –its bizarre and abnormal nature one surpassing the other. Last weekend, I was shocked over a piece of news. “This is something that you wouldn’t even think of in your worst nightmare, that you’d have to charge an 11-year-old with homicide,” according to CNN news. It was even sadder to see the picture of the victim — a young, happy 26-year-old mother-to-be. The killing of this heavily pregnant young woman by a 11-year-old boy took place in Wampum, PA, about 45 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, USA.

I see it as another tragedy brought about by some kind of failure on the part of the adults–both the father and the victim. The boy must have had some insurmountable problems with the dead, yet his father was too careless to ever notice something wrong in the boy.

As the adults enjoyed themselves or celebrated the arrival of a new baby, they must have ignored the needs of this young boy or even care to pay attention to him. Thus, the boy determined to get some national attention in his own way. We can trust his way, right? Wake up, adults! So sad! So stupid that it ever happened!

The adults must have grossly under-estimated the boy’s ability to solve his own problem by himself or must have failed to realize how much pain they had inflicted upon the young boy simply by their having good times with each other. They may be now punished for their ignoring the boy. Or when the father taught the boy how to shoot he failed to instill in the boy the teaching of thou-shall-not-kill together with other good virtues.

There are so many things that we parents should learn from this tragedy if we don’t want to see it happen. Yet, we parents are often too stupid to learn anything from other people’s experience. Well, time to wake up. Get smart and read my forever bona fide postings here. It’s true.

“How many families are happy when how many families are sad”–a line from an old Chinese poem entered my mind on the eve before 2009 Chinese New Year. I saw the picture of the decapitated 22-year-old Chinese student, Xin Yang, from Beijing and could not wipe out the sadness from my heart. My son described the crime as “gruesome.” I cannot imagine how her parents can deal with this tragic blow right now. They just sent their daughter to Virginia Tech on January 18 of this year and learned of her death on January 21.

I may not know the reason of the murder but I can never in my life understand how such abhorring atrocity could be ever carried out. Indeed, murders like this forever perplexes the minds of thousands of kind-hearted people. This time I am more than overcome by total astonishment. I am consumed with deep fear and concern. In fact, we all should be for the safety of our daughters.

For many Chinese parents, personal safety, self-defense and self-protection have never been ranked as important as academic achievements. Since we cannot minimize the risk factors in society and cannot prevent their venturing out, we have to prepare our daughters for the adventure.

But how can we prevent unexpected event like this? I talked to my son and found myself grabbing for words, trying to warn him of anything of this kind, but failed to utter anything specific. I wish I knew better as a parent.

“Greed goes before a fall” — revised version of “Pride goes before a fall.” This is what I finally learn from Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme fraud, the largest of its kind in history. Greed, greed, greed everywhere, on the part of Madoff, and also on the part of some of those being swindled by Madoff.  It was estimated that US government might probably lose as much as $17 billion in lost tax revenue. I am sure many books will be written on this fraud and I can’t wait to read them.

In the process of this, he has succeeded in ruining many people’s lives by hoaxing away millions of dollars from them. The 70-year-old Madoff could not have broken Guinness World Records in the scale of money-swindling without an excellent teamwork of like-minded culprits. It was said that his son turned him in for “a giant Ponzi scheme.” Hopefully, this is not part of another scheme to save his sons, who have a longer road to go than a 70-year-old.

As a parent, I am more interested in the lessons that we can  draw from this economic crime. What is unfolded before us are enormous greed, irresponsibility, audacity, hard-boiled crulty, carefully engineered violation of laws, and insatiable desire for more and more until the criminal gets caught and receives what he desires in the end and go down the history as the biggest money swindler.

When we are free from hunger, disease, cold and worries, with blue sky and under a sunny day, the life is so beautiful as it is. The bottom line is anything is better than knowingly doing what is wrong and eventually, fall eternally and most disgracefully.

One last note, for ordinary folks, be very cautious and do not allow greed to take you to any big or small get-rich-quick scheme.