Summertime Living is Supposed to be Easy

By Marybeth T. Hagan on August 13, 2007 3:27 PM | No Comments

Consider this sampling of headlines from the Saturday and Sunday editions of one of my local newspapers, The Philadelphia Inquirer.

"As suspect surrenders, a family gives up on city"because Lu Jiaxing, 49, was murdered by that suspect during a robbery attempt in the Jiaxing family's Northeast Philadelphia grocery store.

While checking on two suspicious cars behind a Walgreen's store, "Fla. deputy shot, second in week."

"Va. killer may have tried a test run" it seems. "Investigators said Seung-Hui Cho may have chained doors shut two days before the [Virginia] Tech slayings."

"Resolve as victims buried," three victims who were solid-citizen, college-age men brutally murdered execution style during a robbery attempt in Newark, N.J.

"Man held in parents' killing" after slaying his father, 60, mother, 56, and 36-year-old brother with a shotgun in their Towanda, Pa., home.

"Man held in salon hammer attack" after he "stormed a beauty salon and bludgeoned four grandmothers with a hammer" during a "daytime robbery" in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

Had enough? I sure did upon my first reading.

Living in a culture of death -- even in summertime -- is not easy.