Candace Ballard and Jayne Phillips of Woodstock have been charged with
stealing from assisted living facilities in two Georgia counties. Stolen items
include jewelry, credit cards (the women have also been charged with credit
card fraud), and computer equipment. The element of the crime that turns this
case from a petty occurrence to a dastardly act is that the victims of the
thefts were in their 80's and 90's. Police are suspecting that this is a part
of a larger chain of burglaries that spans several states.
Stories like that, although they are probably still more heartening than
what goes on in the rest of the world, make me not want to watch the local news
or listen to it in the morning. Aside from the fact that television networks
like WSBTV tend to exaggerate or sensationalize events when there isn't much
going on in the metro Atlanta area, local news just has a repulsive quality to
it. On a national level, we hear about only the worst acts, committed by the
one in a however many million psychopath that decides to pick up a gun and
shoot out a school. These stories are heart-wrenching, but most accept them as
a result of chance in a place far away, and can remain unperturbed.
This is much more difficult when watching the local news. On the local
level, crimes are either paltry with bad endings, or absolutely horrible stories
about sexual abuse or severely injured children. Both categories are examples
of terrible occurrences that happen on an everyday basis, and it doesn’t serve
as any comfort to know that they at your local Wal-Mart or that the perpetrator
of the horrible crime of attempted television theft will be locked up for the
next 20 years. Everyone knows these things happen, and that they’re only
natural, but they are much harder to process when the murderer in the mug shot on
TV has a much more attractive picture in your high school yearbook.
Local news is something I would love
to be completely ignorant of, because that would make life much more (let’s go
for the corny option) blissful.
Information from: http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local/two-woman-charged-in-assisted-living-thefts/nSwFk/
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