Recently in Moral Ethics Category

A few weeks ago, Hillary wrote about the website, peopleofwalmart. At the time I refrained from commenting because, well, I felt bad. I grew up in small towns around Missouri where Wal-Mart was the primary source of...everything. And while the people of Wal-Mart were fair enough fodder for my friends and I, I didn't want the coastal elite mocking "my people", such as they were.

That's how I imagined the website's audience; sheltered east coast jerks who thought the heartland was a group of throwaway flyover states (forget the fact that even my Midwestern friends assured me that the website was enjoyable and ridiculous).

Last night changed my mind. I'm currently in Missouri visiting my family, and took a quick jaunt with my mom to, you guessed it, Wal-Mart. As we waited in the checkout line, I started thinking about the website, mentally shaking my head at those who would so cruelly mock the poor, the obese and the fashionably ridiculous. Then, I casually glanced to the right, and did a double-take when I saw a man covered in dirt and mud. Top to bottom.

As lab tech Raymond Clark III appeared in a New Haven court today to be charged with the murder of 24-year-old Annie Le, killed by "traumatic asphyxiation" just days before she was to be married and found stuffed in a wall of the Yale lab where she was a graduate student, the AP is reporting:

New Haven Police Chief James Lewis said Le's death was a case of workplace violence. "It is important to note that this is not about urban crime, university crime, domestic crime but an issue of workplace violence, which is becoming a growing concern around the country," Lewis said, adding he wasn't ruling out additional charges.

Also according to the AP, Yale's president issued a statement to the Yale community saying: 

"This incident could have happened in any city, in any university, or in any workplace. It says more about the dark side of the human soul than it does about the extent of security measures."

This is a terrible story, and what makes it doubly frightening to me is this notion of "coworkers gone wild" or gone "postal," as we used to say, before that became too un-PC.