Thought Leadership Articles
Creating Confidence and the Long Island Murder
By Jeffrey M. Saltzman, M.A.
On Long Island, in a neighborhood not all that far from NYC, there was a murder this month. In fact, it was not so much of a murder as it was an old style lynching carried out by those with a mob mentality, a gang of high school boys who took sport in torturing their fellow human beings, viewing it as a pleasurable activity. They routinely hunted Latinos, shooting them with BB guns, jumping them and punching them as they drove around. This time, their sport led to the fatal stabbing and the death of an Ecuadorian immigrant, Marcelo Lucero, simply because he was Latino and viewed as easy prey. NYC, the bastion of liberalism, where we are supposed to be more tolerant of people’s differences, where we take pride in our live-and-let-live attitude regarding how people live their lives—how could something like this happen here? It could happen anywhere. That is not an excuse as much as it is a warning. As terrible as that crime was, another crime is now being committed and it is a failure of leadership in a time of crisis.