They Say Justice in America is Blind. The Gadfly Agrees - Adding That it is Also Deaf, Dumb, Morally Challenged, and Corrupt . . .

This is a tragic story any way you look at it, but let's talk about this for a moment:

(Reuters) - A South Carolina mother who gave her infant daughter a lethal dose of morphine via her breast milk was sentenced on Friday to 20 years in prison, a prosecutor said.

Former nurse Stephanie Greene, 39, was convicted in Spartanburg on Thursday of homicide by child abuse, involuntary manslaughter and unlawful neglect of a child.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/04/us-usa-south-carolina-breastmilk-idUSBREA331G120140404



Ok - for the sake of this brief analysis and debate - let's agree that this drug-addicted woman was completely negligent in her use of harmful substances while nursing her newborn child.  The Gadfly doesn't have a problem agreeing to that observation.

Ok - so a jury convicted Greene and a judge sentenced her to 20 years in prison.

Let's draw a parallel here shall we?  Bear with The Gadfly - an eventual point will be made.

This woman was convicted and sentenced to a long prison sentence for putting life harming substances in to her body.  Greene's body, in this case, represents the life giving vessel from which her newborn infant daughter received the sustenance which in turn provided life.  Stephanie Greene poisoned that vessel and destroyed the life giving properties of the mother's milk which sustained the life of her child.

Still with The Gadfly dear readers?

For putting those poisons in to the vessel which, instead of sustaining the life of her baby girl, killed her, Stephanie Greene was deemed a very bad human being and sent away to pretty much rot in prison.

Let's take this whole sordid story to the next level.  Can we agree that like Stephanie Greene's body being a life-giving vessel to her infant daughter, the planet Earth and it's natural resources are a life giving vessel to the humans who inhabit it?  Ok - so when a major industrialist corporation illegally and clandestinely dumps radioactive materials from it's mining operations into a community's back yard - possibly exposing hundreds if not thousands to the deadly effects of those materials - how exactly is that different from what Stephanie Greene did to her baby?  Or how about when willful negligence results in an oil rig explosion that kills eleven people and the resulting oil spill despoils thousands of miles of beautiful American shoreline and destroys both human and wildlife habitat?  Or when equally gross negligence results in a major toxic chemical spill into a river that is the primary source of life giving, fresh drinking water for a region of half a million citizens?

Where are the criminal charges and the trials and the convictions and the prison sentences for the people responsible for willfully and knowingly exposing millions of Americans to the deadly substances which they are dumping in to our life giving vessel - our earthly environment?  How are their actions any different in essence than those that Stephanie Greene committed when she knowingly put drugs in to her body which she knew could harm her infant daughter?

When the leaders of this country can provide a coherent, substantive answer to those questions from The Gadfly, perhaps there is still a chance we can still have a meaningful, productive dialogue.  But for as long as those questions go unanswered by those "leaders", they have no right to expect any measurable level of respect or deference from the written words on this shitty little blog.



----TFG