“What is more dangerous in Ukraine than in Washington or Chicago?” Andrey Baida, a Ukrainian, commented on the Facebook post of a Ukrainian blogger on Tuesday about the brutal slaying of Iryna Zarutska on a light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina which occurred last month but the world has only learned about this past week.
The most chilling aspect of the video of Zarutska’s senseless killing that has now gone viral on the Internet is the look of terror on her face when she looks at her attacker. I know what it’s like to be in her shoes.
Nearly five years ago, I was also attacked from behind by a dread-lock sporting man who happened to be Black while walking on a sidewalk in broad daylight in Washington, DC. When I turned to confront my attacker and ask him why he was doing this, his face was entirely without emotion – he could have been a zombie.
I fought him off, but not before he landed eight stab wounds. People just walked on by (remember this was Washington, where the most gutless Americans gather), but later the police apprehended the man and to the best of my knowledge he’s still in prison.
He was also a schizophrenic, like the man who killed Zarutska.
Maine Wire readers may well get tired of my repeating this grisly and now all too seemingly common story, which I relayed some weeks earlier when President Donald Trump deployed National Guardsmen to patrol the streets of Washington, and I’d just as soon forget about it, frankly. But it just keeps happening.
Slowly, and reluctantly, the mainstream media has begun covering the story of Zarutska’s murder because they had no choice. It was an inconvenient reminder of how dangerous America’s streets are today that ran against several prevailing narratives in newsrooms today:
- “Privilege” leads to injustice (my own mother, an avid consumer of mainstream media) on learning of my attack said it must have happened because I looked “too privileged”
- Crime is going down in American cities, and
- It’s guns that kill people, the quicker we ban them the safer we’ll be.
There are others too. Stand with Ukraine read the bumper stickers on the backs of so many cars nowadays, but how about stand up to violence on the streets at home?
The front page of the Kyiv Post lamented yesterday that too many Americans are pouring out their hearts for Zarutska but what about the citizens of Donetsk oblast who are being slaughtered in drives by the Russian military? Fair question, but people tend to be moved most by what happens where they live.
“We don’t have to live this way,” my colleague Steve Robinson wrote of the Zarutska slaying in his Substack column on Monday. Of course he’s right, and I’m not just saying this because he’s my boss. We can choose to confront reality instead of simply getting mired down in tired narratives about why things are the way they are.
Maybe the brutal killing on readily available video as dirty as a snuff flick will shock people to their senses.
Maybe.
The answers aren’t simple, like the narratives that lull us into senselessness are. But the number one job of government is to keep us safe, and the killing of a Ukrainian refugee who fled violence in her own country to come here for that illusory promise shows that government is failing.
Once we focus squarely – and successfully – on that, we can begin fixing the other stuff.
