You Can't Fix Stupid

Ok…here’s the difference between me and this world.

This morning, I read the story of Markisha Jones and Gene Edwards of Chicago who were arrested for criminal child neglect. Their twin girls, Mia and Mya were celebrating their first birthday in a shared crib in the basement of a rundown apartment while Mom and Dad were upstairs playing video games. Apparently the alleged parents were quite fond of video games, as they had been so transfixed they had forgotten to feed their children. Father Gene finally noticed that his girls were starting to look “a little skinny” so he called 911, whereupon he and his gaming girlfriend were promptly jailed as Mya passed away on the dining room table. The unmarried couple was charged with involuntary manslaughter and felony child endangerment. Mia has been placed in protective care.

Our world will look at this story and immediately began constructing excuses. Like vegetables flying around inside of a blender, the facts in this case will be obscured beyond recognition by any number of tangential issues having nothing to do with anything as follows:

1. Jesse Jackson will show up soon bellyaching about the fact that the couple’s mug shots were published along with this story in a racist attempt to stigmatize the African American community.
2. A spokeswoman from Mothers Against Video Games will assail the manufacturers of whatever game they were playing while the kids starved in the basement, proclaiming this tragedy as undeniable proof that video games contribute to poor parenting.
3. Mayor Rahm Emanuel will take the opportunity to call for more spending on poverty programs.
4. President Obama will point out the fact that if he neglected to feed his girls for weeks while playing video games, they would look an awful lot like Mia and Mya.
5. Somebody from Planned Parenthood will point out how this whole sorry tale could have been avoided if only Markisha had had an abortion.
6. Somebody from Focus on the Family will decry the fact that Gene and Markisha were, in fact, unmarried and living in sin.

Meanwhile, we have a dead one year old child.

This is not a case of “babies having babies.” When the twins were born, their mother was 18, their father 21. Considering the fact that fifty years ago, this couple might have been on their second or third child at that age makes that argument sound ridiculous. My mother had two kids by the time she was 19 and four by the time she turned 27. Neither is this a tragic case of lack of adequate poverty programs. This couple qualified for free formula along with a plethora of other city, state and government handouts that could have provided all of the nutrition required for two growing babies. This is also manifestly not about the race of the parents. This couple could just as easily been Bubba and Jolene from Chicken Scratch, Kentucky. The only real, true culprits here are these two moronic pieces of pond scum slouched back on their sofa trying to get to the next level of Mario Kart while two innocent children perished from neglect in a cold clammy basement warmed only by a space heater. I’ll let all of the poverty pimps and the root cause crowd figure out how to blame this on the Koch brothers. I’ll let the politicians try to score cheap political points by spinning this tragedy into a fund-raising letter. While they are doing all of that, I’ll tell you what I would do if I were King. I would arrange to have Markisha and Gene hung by the neck until they were dead, or at the very least spend the rest of their pathetic existence behind bars. Then I would cut through all the red tape so that Mia is given to a family of responsible, loving parents who give a damn about children.

Sometimes, you just can’t fix stupid.