You can only be superior when you're a victim of crime
27 11 08 - 08:56 At his guilty plea in October, Brown said that he and co-defendant Rapheal Willis killed Osborn in November 2005 after they saw him riding a bicycle near 47th Street and Blue Ridge Boulevard.Family members painted a warm picture of Osborn, whom they described as an adventurous renaissance man, passionately interested in engineering, aviation, the environment and Biblical scholarship. The judge viewed a computer presentation that depicted photos from Osborn’s life and a video of his 2004 testimony before a City Council committee on storm water drainage.
Randy Osborn remembered how his older brother would make plaques, often for complete strangers he had just met, explaining their history of their names.
“Robert had an incredible and amazing ability to make you feel special,” Randy Osborn said.
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Notice how much is made of how the victim was a special person, with traits considered admirable and achievements listed. As a "quality" person, the reader is supposed to feel that this death is that much more tragic than that of someone who had done nothing considered positive or remarkable in his life. His life was worth more. This is the correct attitude. People are worth more if they do things that are regarded as helpful or outstanding in some way. Do people generally consider whether they do things in their life to make them superior to other people - to justify their place in our overcrowded world?
It is odd that the same media and establishment that generally promotes a message of all men being equal nevertheless remarks on a victim's qualities in this way and so often the victim's status is a factor considered by judge, jury and the public. (Not necessarily qualities that all of us would commend, but the the point still stands.)
What then should we make of the situation where people who are considered valuable for what they have acheived and are expected to achieve are replaced with people who have nothing admirable about them? Or when we are urged to pity those who are most useless and breed most prolifically and fund their lives - the same kind of people who go on perhaps to commit crimes like the one mentioned above? The hypocrisy of then listing the qualities of the victim in comparison with his murderers is stark.
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