"Youth violence" has not exactly been a headline issue around here. When stories pop up in the daily newspaper, they tend to be about the gangs on the South Side of Providence. But it is a problem that transcends socio-economic and culture and is likely to show up anywhere. Case in point: the Thayer Street retail area on the East Side of Providence, hugging the campuses of Brown University and RISD.
Last week, P&J spoke with Reed Cosper, the Rhode Island Mental Health Advocate. Reed told us about a situation on the East Side of Providence that stunned your superior correspondents.
Reed has a client who is mentally disabled and had been staying at Butler Hospital. One evening this client was on Thayer Street in front of Store 24 when a melee broke out. The mob wound up beating the man unconscious. And what is most incredible about this story is the whole thing was videotaped and lived on YouTube for well over a week before it was taken down.
The Providence police have apparently looked into the matter, but the detective on the case was off duty when P&J called this week.
The young man under Cosper's care has agreed to talk to Phillipe & Jorge. He knows our work and trusts us to render his story faithfully. So, next week in the "Cool, Cool World," look for a further exploration into the wild nights on Thayer Street. We trust that the rest of the media, both print and broadcast, will find this to be of sufficient importance to take a look for themselves.
BAD SPORTS
Saadi Qadaffi is the son of Muammar who is now trying to strike some sort of plea bargain with the new Libyan government to essentially make sure that the family is not treated the way Muammar treated his own people for decades. He is also a poster boy for corrupt influence peddling.
Seems Saadi fancied himself quite the soccer player as a 'ute, and so Daddy arranged for the owner/president of AC Milan, who are the New York Yankees of Italian soccer (calcio, for the cognoscenti), a guy named Silvio Berlusconi (who has another day job you may be familiar with) to get his son playing in Serie A, the big leagues over there.
His skills were widely ridiculed by the league's world players and coaches, who saw this gambit for what it was — one dictator handing a sop to another, no doubt for future considerations. But he could still always claim to have played in Serie A, still a sure way to pull a bird most places in Europe.
Not that this could happen here in the US. Just imagine a powerful politician buying his dim, talentless son into the part ownership of a major league baseball team, say in a place like Texas, where he would sit grinning like a chimpanzee in a box seat while his financial stock rose, and then using his spoils to buy a luxurious ranch in a place like . . . well, let's just make up a name like "Crawford," and having Poppy launch his now supposedly accomplished son into a governorship, and then — hey, why not let our imaginations run free — use a bought-and-paid-for Supreme Court to boost him into the presidency of the country, where he would finally be revealed as an elitist idiot as he moved the US into two nightmare wars and an economic depression. Boy, that makes even the Qaddaffi-Berlusconi charade look cheap in comparison, doesn't it?
