Column-ness!

For lack of any other content, I'm going to post a copy of my last JMC-201 assignment. My TA liked it - he said it had a strong and unique voice. So...here it is. Criticize, fawn over it, do what you wish.

Just don't ever mention AP style to me. I can't find my damn stylebook.

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Punishing Sins of the Past…or Wasting Money?

In this time of uncertainty and fear in American daily life, it’s a great feeling knowing that our United States Department of Justice is doing its best to combat the so-called “enemies” of our countries.

Who is this enemy, you ask? Apparently, Josias Kumpf, age 75 years…a retired sausage-maker living in Racine, Wisconsin, and former Nazi guard. The Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office have opened a criminal investigation into Mr. Kumpf’s alleged past, and are seeking to revoke his citizenship because he may have been involved in the massacre of innocents at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, near Berlin, in 1943.

Eli Rosenbaum, Director of the Office of Special Investigations, believes this case is vital. “No person who participated in such a shocking act of brutality should enjoy the privilege of U.S. citizenship” he states.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your tax dollars at work. Instead of fighting terrorism, we’re deporting senior citizens. But the apparent waste of tax dollars isn’t even the biggest issue at stake here. The big issue here is whether or not we should be concentrating so much time and effort on crimes of the past when we can’t even solve crimes of the present.

Take the recent case of Edgar Ray Killen. Killen, a former Ku Klux Klan organizer, was arrested initially in 1965 for the murder of three civil rights activists. Killen was not convicted, and was released. Yet, in 2004, new evidence came to light, and Killen was arrested in 2005. Killen was convicted in 2006, and sentenced to three 20-year sentences, served concurrently. By this time, Killen was an infirm old man, confined to a wheelchair, barely able to lift his right arm to be sworn in during his trial. Yet, this trial against an elderly man was considered one of Mississippi’s highest priority cases.

The case of Byron De La Beckwith also comes to light. Another former Ku Klux Klan member, he was arrested in 1964 and tried twice for the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Both juries were unable to reach a unanimous verdict, and Beckwith was released; however, new evidence was uncovered, and in 1994, was convicted of the crime.

These cases both have something in common with the Kumpf case: both cases are coming forward over thirty years after the alleged crime. (In the case of Killen and Kumpf, over forty years had elapsed.) But why are these cases so important to justify spending so much money on, especially in this time of uncertainty in Homeland Security? I have to assume that there is something more important for our government to be protecting us from.

Or, perhaps our government is making an attempt to clues in on a blinding new fact: are the elderly, infirm, and disabled the new terrorist threat? Who knows? The U.S. Government may know something we, as ordinary citizens, do not.

One thing’s for certain: I’ll never look at bingo gatherings the same again. Because, if Kumpf is as dangerous as the government makes him seem to be…I can’t imagine the atrocities that could happen there.