monday punch-in-the-face blogging

after a boston-area woman was shot in the head and killed by a stray bullet while leaving an acquaintance's home around 4 AM this past saturday, boston's mayor menino demanded an immediate end to--what? can you guess? not gun sales, not gang violence . . .

late-night parties. these, according to menino, are the root of all of the crime and assorted evils taking place in the commonwealth of massachusetts. and this most recent call to arms is simply icing on the mayor's fold-up-the-streets-at-dusk cake: in january the city instituted a mandatory 11 PM stop time on all events allowing the attendance of people under the age of twenty-one, a move the mayor and his staff have offered zero concrete data in support of and which strikes me as arbitrary, knee-jerk, and poorly informed. i've been going to clubs and concerts since i was fifteen, and from what i've seen it's never the people under twenty-one who are causing problems; the troublemakers on the streets are generally drunks of legal age who just happen to be idiots and/or assholes, and while boston's done its best to keep them in line with a hopelessly insufficient late-night public transportation system (i'm still not sure if city officials are trying to keep people from going out or to effect some sort of darwinian drunk-driving-induced thinning of the herd), that particular crowd will not be stopped by any such measure.

i used to think menino was a bit of a magoo--well-intentioned, if somewhat bumbling and slightly socially oblivious--but now i'm under the impression that he is, at his heart, a crotchety, delusional old coot. forget the fact that saturday's gunfire was apparently entirely unrelated to the party the victim was leaving and was initiated by individuals who had not been in attendance; forget the fact that the victim was doing nothing more rowdy or rebellious than walking from a house to a car in front of that house; forget, too, that even if she was minding her own business, she was on the street in the middle of the night in a known high-crime neighborhood: ALL PARTYING AFTER MIDNIGHT DRAWS THE DEVIL. in menino's own words, "we know all those parties bring bad events in our city." not the weapons or the potentially inadequate law enforcement--the parties. THE PARTIES.

do you think those puritans would ever have braved the open seas and colonized this forbidding wilderness if they had known that in only a few short centuries it would be the hedonistic free-for-all it's become? you night owls have dedicated your bacchanalian lives to disgracing an entire state and its honorable legacy, and now your revelry has claimed another victim. for shame.