Overheard and Underwhelmed
Occasionally, even the jaded journalist veteran of Humboldt County can be shocked by the level to which this community is divided.
On two separate recent occasions, once in a liquor store — yes, buying liquor — and once outside the Humboldt County Courthouse chronicling on video the Men-in-Blue arraignment, I happened to overhear comments made by passers-by that exposed some ugly, but unfortunately widespread, ill will.
At the unnamed liquor well, a woman who looked like she'd slobbered on the smoking end of a meth pipe for going on a decade took great pleasure in the recent breakout of "Baywood Disease."
The Aristocracy, she said, finally taking it where they deserved.
She used other words, most of them consisting of one syllable and four letters, but the point was the same.
Dealing day in and day out with the dregs like myself who wander in to accommodate various addictions, she still took delicious and frightening pleasure in the irony of country clubbers losing their stomachs on their wingtips. For days. In excruciating agony.
The woman is apparently unaware that Baywood is hardly a five-star kind of paradise. It lacks little in the way of amenities, sure, but it also plays host to a number of functions whose participants can hardly be called the social elite ... the Northern California Association of Non-Profits, for example, is not exactly made up of Skull-and-Bones graduates.
The other comment was actually made to me, as throngs of cops made their supportive pilgrimage to the courtroom, for once in defense of suspects.
A man, dressed in blue collar jeans and flannel and looking as if he was tired of everything governmental, uttered a coarse line to me as he passed in the wake of the police train.
"Careful around those guys — they'll shoot you soon as look at you," he said, gesturing toward the officers.
Now there's a vote of confidence from John Q. Public.
I doubt the guy is representative of the greater Eureka area's collective opinion, but just to know that such opinions exist, sucks.
Police agencies are made of the same stuff the make up newspapers, namely people. Which, in translation, means there are some good and bad people filling the four walls of the Eureka Police Department. That's just reality. And whether it was a mistake of criminal proportions to send in cops when they did with Cheri Lyn Moore is now something a jury will decide.
But I have little doubt that the intentions of Douglas and Zanotti were to protect the public, and not riddle an addled woman full of holes.
Platitudes, generalities, smokescreens, half-truths — the state of the public's mood and education in Humboldt County? Hell, if that's the case, it just means we in the media need to do a better job of clearing the air. And, even more importantly, get people to read the newspaper (or Web site) when we already do.
Comments
I hear 'ya James ... one thing we seem to do very well here is fight. And we fight about the damnedest things.
A few days ago I posted a notice on a local tech email listserv about the impending deadline to participate in the Delta Airlines travel bank in an effort to attract alternative air connections at our local airport. The result has been a 20+ email he-said-she-said argument over carbon footprints, growth-no-growth, over regulation, corporate personhood and carbon offsets.
Apparently the "if this is not of interest to you" advisory at the opening of my post was insufficient to stem the tide.
Merry Christmas and take solace from the hundreds if not thousands of hard working, grounded, caring people out there for each disgruntled ranter.
Posted by: Chris Crawford | December 19, 2007 04:13 PM