Post by Black Sakura on Sept 1, 2006 5:32:41 GMT -5
Society’s Biggest Problem--Crime
(By me in 7th grade)
A shadow stole down a country road in peaceful Sedona, California, as the time approached dusk. Picturesque barns, scattered lupine and abundant patches of tall grass glistened in the golden gleam of the falling sun. Rusty barbed-wire-and-stake fences constrain placid bovines to their meadows and prevent them from meandering across the so-called road to the other field. The shadow stops in a patch of light. We see a man, a handsome Hispanic man, whom we cannot recognize. He darts on furtively past a patient cow chewing her cud that, looking at him over the fence, is his sole witness. A ripping noise tears our gaze from the creature and focuses it on the shadow-man. He has torn the seat of his jeans on the barbs of the fence. After muttering a stream of profanity at the perfectly blameless cow, the man advances towards a ramshackle barn. His hand dives in his pocket and draws from it a ring of shiny keys. The keys go to the uncannily new set of locks on the barn door. Shadow-man advances to the door and inserts three keys into the locks, one by one. With three clicks, the door swings open, revealing a dark hole of blackness. The man, now invisible in the darkness, fumbles about until he finds a light, which he turns on with a tug. We see that this barn is no state of dilapidation on the inside as it is out. We also see that large sacks of powdered cocaine are stacked neatly on pallets. This is a drug-supplier’s warehouse! A forklift lies inert along the east wall. The Hispanic gets in and revs up the engine. After ensuring that the machine worked, he retrieves from his pocket an i-pod, which he immediately begins to play. It’s the best way for him to pass the time till dark.
Crime is a gigantic society problem that needs to be resolved. However, unless one certain generation turned out to be perfect angels, crime will never end. It exists in some of the most best-selling and most famous novels, and in the longest-running plays. It was heard of thousands of years ago, and has not ceased unto this very day. It varies from a simple pick-pocketing to drug abusing to homicide. Not one man lives who is unaffected by crime. There will always be at least one desperado, no matter how many policemen there are in the world.
Crime thrills spectators and readers every day. The Mousetrap, a detective story by Agatha Christie, has set the world record as the world’s most longest-running play. Sherlock Holmes fights crime and criminal, the latter category including the infamous Professor Moriaty and Colonel Sebastian Moran, (the former referred to more by radio script-writers and in continuations after Doyle stopped writing the series.) Andy Griffith went with Barney to go stop the not-so-serious criminals on his show. Hercule Poirot, in between attracting the attention of the Countess Vera Rossakoff, uses his ‘little gray cells’ to astonish his readers. There are countless other stories that revolve around crime. Oliver Twist is a good example. The Boxcar Children and the Bobbsey Twins investigate crime for their friends and family. Nancy Drew (and Bess, and George, and Ned!) and the Hardy Boys have been popular adolescent crime-fighters for decades. The Phantom of the Opera most definitely counts as a thrilling mystery novel. There are many others, including the Americans Phillip Marlowe, the Green Hornet, The Texas Rangers, the Saint, and Mr. They W. Rei. Crime entertains, and crime is punished in due process of law.
The Bible carries the record of the first murder; in Genesis, Cain murders Abel because of hatred and jealousy. From then on, it seemed that mankind thought that, to quote the title of a book by Agatha Christie, “Murder is Easy.” Murderous and criminally-inclined individuals have existed ever since, and have endangered society time and time again. Brutus murdered Julius Caesar. Queen Elizabeth in Elizabethan England killed her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid of the ‘Hole in the Wall Gang’ were among the many that looted and ravaged the American west in the 18-1900s. Jack the Ripper, in Victorian England, killed a great many of unsuspecting women; I believe the number to be 11. Adolph Hitler committed a large-scale genocide of the Jewish race and religion during World War 2. Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the airplane crashes into the Pentagon and the no-longer-existent World Trade Center. Scott Peterson killed his wife Lacy only recently. All of these people had one thing in common--murder and crime were their middle names, to put it frankly. Not one man lives that is unaffected in any way by crime.
Crime is committed for many different reasons and in many different ways. There is the spontaneous action, a crime done on a spur-of-the-moment basis. Then there is the well-planned and thought out offense; what every evil villain dreams of, ‘the perfect crime’ which is so clearly thought out and committed that it confuses the investigators, who do one of three things. #1, drop the case and never solve it, #2, allow themselves to be led down the garden path and arrest and convict the wrong person (framed by the actual culprit), or #3, eventually disentangle the crime’s twisted threads and capture the real culprit. The three main reasons for committing offenses of the law include the following: for hatred of a person, for the indulging in the simple thrill of committing crime, for necessity. However their subtle variations, though, they all leave a victim who is either dead or shall remember the entire affair years to come.
Crime affects everyone. Even I, at age thirteen, have come under the horrible spell of crime more than once, though, fortunately, it has never been very extreme. People have stolen things from me and members of my family, people have vandalized our belongings and possessions more than once. However, I enjoy very much reading whodunits and trying to guess (or deduce) the culprit when it is fiction. Even when it is not necessarily fiction, but perhaps real life, I do not mind a good mystery as long as it does not directly concern me.
We left our Hispanic friend, the cocaine-hoarder, dozing off in his forklift. We come back to the scene now. It has turned to night. A truck honks and backs up into the barn. Its headlights shine brightly. The man awakes and realizes his client is here for pick-up. He glances at the truck; it has an advertisement for frozen food painted on its side to make it seem less suspicious. He alights from his forklift and hastens to open the door of the truck, to his own misfortune! As soon as the door goes up, the noses of three Colt .45s are at his head. The policemen arrest Marcus Vasquez for illegal drug smuggling from South America into the United States. What the inopportune Marcus should have known was that crime never pays!
Crime; it exists everywhere. In some places, crime is not such a bad thing, one might be entertainment purposes. Many plays, such as Macbeth (Shakespeare) or Witness for the Prosecution (Agatha Christie), tell an intriguing story of crime. Books simply reek of crime and similar ill doings. Crime has not ceased since it began thousands of years ago. King Tutankhamen was murdered at age 19, and that was thousands of years ago. Crime has different reasons for being committed, and it has different ways of achieving goals. Not one man lives that is impervious to crime, in any or all of its forms. Many more like Senor Vasquez exist, both in our country and others. What can we do to stop these fiends? All we can do is continue to be as vigilant and alert as ever for anything suspicious. If we have more police, that may help. All in all, crime is an evil thing that society should rectify, but, most unfortunately, society cannot rectify it. It is a bad habit the people must learn to stop doing, like biting one’s nails. If the community makes not the move to change their ways, no one can make them do so. In other words, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.’ Suppose that we can someday lead our horse of society to the drinking trough while it is thirsty. Then, just perhaps, the level of crime in our world will decrease significantly.
(By me in 7th grade)
A shadow stole down a country road in peaceful Sedona, California, as the time approached dusk. Picturesque barns, scattered lupine and abundant patches of tall grass glistened in the golden gleam of the falling sun. Rusty barbed-wire-and-stake fences constrain placid bovines to their meadows and prevent them from meandering across the so-called road to the other field. The shadow stops in a patch of light. We see a man, a handsome Hispanic man, whom we cannot recognize. He darts on furtively past a patient cow chewing her cud that, looking at him over the fence, is his sole witness. A ripping noise tears our gaze from the creature and focuses it on the shadow-man. He has torn the seat of his jeans on the barbs of the fence. After muttering a stream of profanity at the perfectly blameless cow, the man advances towards a ramshackle barn. His hand dives in his pocket and draws from it a ring of shiny keys. The keys go to the uncannily new set of locks on the barn door. Shadow-man advances to the door and inserts three keys into the locks, one by one. With three clicks, the door swings open, revealing a dark hole of blackness. The man, now invisible in the darkness, fumbles about until he finds a light, which he turns on with a tug. We see that this barn is no state of dilapidation on the inside as it is out. We also see that large sacks of powdered cocaine are stacked neatly on pallets. This is a drug-supplier’s warehouse! A forklift lies inert along the east wall. The Hispanic gets in and revs up the engine. After ensuring that the machine worked, he retrieves from his pocket an i-pod, which he immediately begins to play. It’s the best way for him to pass the time till dark.
Crime is a gigantic society problem that needs to be resolved. However, unless one certain generation turned out to be perfect angels, crime will never end. It exists in some of the most best-selling and most famous novels, and in the longest-running plays. It was heard of thousands of years ago, and has not ceased unto this very day. It varies from a simple pick-pocketing to drug abusing to homicide. Not one man lives who is unaffected by crime. There will always be at least one desperado, no matter how many policemen there are in the world.
Crime thrills spectators and readers every day. The Mousetrap, a detective story by Agatha Christie, has set the world record as the world’s most longest-running play. Sherlock Holmes fights crime and criminal, the latter category including the infamous Professor Moriaty and Colonel Sebastian Moran, (the former referred to more by radio script-writers and in continuations after Doyle stopped writing the series.) Andy Griffith went with Barney to go stop the not-so-serious criminals on his show. Hercule Poirot, in between attracting the attention of the Countess Vera Rossakoff, uses his ‘little gray cells’ to astonish his readers. There are countless other stories that revolve around crime. Oliver Twist is a good example. The Boxcar Children and the Bobbsey Twins investigate crime for their friends and family. Nancy Drew (and Bess, and George, and Ned!) and the Hardy Boys have been popular adolescent crime-fighters for decades. The Phantom of the Opera most definitely counts as a thrilling mystery novel. There are many others, including the Americans Phillip Marlowe, the Green Hornet, The Texas Rangers, the Saint, and Mr. They W. Rei. Crime entertains, and crime is punished in due process of law.
The Bible carries the record of the first murder; in Genesis, Cain murders Abel because of hatred and jealousy. From then on, it seemed that mankind thought that, to quote the title of a book by Agatha Christie, “Murder is Easy.” Murderous and criminally-inclined individuals have existed ever since, and have endangered society time and time again. Brutus murdered Julius Caesar. Queen Elizabeth in Elizabethan England killed her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid of the ‘Hole in the Wall Gang’ were among the many that looted and ravaged the American west in the 18-1900s. Jack the Ripper, in Victorian England, killed a great many of unsuspecting women; I believe the number to be 11. Adolph Hitler committed a large-scale genocide of the Jewish race and religion during World War 2. Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the airplane crashes into the Pentagon and the no-longer-existent World Trade Center. Scott Peterson killed his wife Lacy only recently. All of these people had one thing in common--murder and crime were their middle names, to put it frankly. Not one man lives that is unaffected in any way by crime.
Crime is committed for many different reasons and in many different ways. There is the spontaneous action, a crime done on a spur-of-the-moment basis. Then there is the well-planned and thought out offense; what every evil villain dreams of, ‘the perfect crime’ which is so clearly thought out and committed that it confuses the investigators, who do one of three things. #1, drop the case and never solve it, #2, allow themselves to be led down the garden path and arrest and convict the wrong person (framed by the actual culprit), or #3, eventually disentangle the crime’s twisted threads and capture the real culprit. The three main reasons for committing offenses of the law include the following: for hatred of a person, for the indulging in the simple thrill of committing crime, for necessity. However their subtle variations, though, they all leave a victim who is either dead or shall remember the entire affair years to come.
Crime affects everyone. Even I, at age thirteen, have come under the horrible spell of crime more than once, though, fortunately, it has never been very extreme. People have stolen things from me and members of my family, people have vandalized our belongings and possessions more than once. However, I enjoy very much reading whodunits and trying to guess (or deduce) the culprit when it is fiction. Even when it is not necessarily fiction, but perhaps real life, I do not mind a good mystery as long as it does not directly concern me.
We left our Hispanic friend, the cocaine-hoarder, dozing off in his forklift. We come back to the scene now. It has turned to night. A truck honks and backs up into the barn. Its headlights shine brightly. The man awakes and realizes his client is here for pick-up. He glances at the truck; it has an advertisement for frozen food painted on its side to make it seem less suspicious. He alights from his forklift and hastens to open the door of the truck, to his own misfortune! As soon as the door goes up, the noses of three Colt .45s are at his head. The policemen arrest Marcus Vasquez for illegal drug smuggling from South America into the United States. What the inopportune Marcus should have known was that crime never pays!
Crime; it exists everywhere. In some places, crime is not such a bad thing, one might be entertainment purposes. Many plays, such as Macbeth (Shakespeare) or Witness for the Prosecution (Agatha Christie), tell an intriguing story of crime. Books simply reek of crime and similar ill doings. Crime has not ceased since it began thousands of years ago. King Tutankhamen was murdered at age 19, and that was thousands of years ago. Crime has different reasons for being committed, and it has different ways of achieving goals. Not one man lives that is impervious to crime, in any or all of its forms. Many more like Senor Vasquez exist, both in our country and others. What can we do to stop these fiends? All we can do is continue to be as vigilant and alert as ever for anything suspicious. If we have more police, that may help. All in all, crime is an evil thing that society should rectify, but, most unfortunately, society cannot rectify it. It is a bad habit the people must learn to stop doing, like biting one’s nails. If the community makes not the move to change their ways, no one can make them do so. In other words, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.’ Suppose that we can someday lead our horse of society to the drinking trough while it is thirsty. Then, just perhaps, the level of crime in our world will decrease significantly.
