The Hard Truth From Orlando

Yeardley Love and George Huguely at UVA – the latest names
in the never-ending saga of date and acquaintance violence
ending in murder, and I have to wonder, why is it all the
hard-charging, smart young women pick such losers for
boyfriends? And make no mistake, Georgie-boy was a loser
and he chose to be a loser. He chose to lose his temper, he
chose to lose control of his drinking, he chose to lose control
of his life and he chose to beat his girlfriend’s head in. That
qualifies him as a loser. But picking him and putting up with
his bad behavior for even a minute made Yeardley a loser, too.
Unfortunately, she’s paid the final price for her poor decision,
while Georgie-boy keeps sucking air and being a threat to the
community.

No, it’s true she didn’t go out and pick a guy who she thought
might beat her head in one day. But the first time Georgie-boy
took her cell phone and went through her messages without her
permission, she had all the information she needed about him.
The first time he got in her face or made a nasty, cutting
remark about her person, friends or family because she was
paying attention to someone other than him, she had all the
information she needed. The first time she opened her email
to a threat from him, she had all the information she needed.
The first time she was afraid of his anger because she had to
tell him something he wasn’t going to want to hear, she had
all the information she needed. The first time he got into a
scuffle over some triviality or threw a tantrum because things
didn’t go his way, she had all the information she needed.

Under any of those circumstances and a thousand other cues,
she knew or should have known he was never going to be a
partner, not a friend – he was a threat to her and everything
she hoped to have for herself and her future and she should
have cut him out of her life then and there. And she should
have and probably did recognize he was horribly flawed before
she became intimate with him but she continued in the
relationship like most women do, convincing herself – well,
he’s not that bad, it’s just sometimes, he didn’t mean it –
until it got so bad she couldn’t believe the excuses she was
making for him and tried to walk away while still “being
just friends.”

She probably broke their relationship off just when he
believed he had her firmly under his control because she’d
let him get away with his behavior for so long. She didn’t
file a complaint; she didn’t get a restraining order; she
didn’t relocate or even contact his or her parents about
his behavior and why she didn’t want him around any
more. Acquaintances and family might be saying they
didn’t know she was being abused, but the fact that
Georgie took her computer from her room after beating
her to death plainly indicates he knew what threats he’d
been making and that they would be used against him.

And so passes another promising young woman who made
a really crappy decision in her choice for companionship and
paid for it with her life. And society is stuck with the loss of
another productive citizen and the burden of a man-shaped
monster that never was worth the powder to blow him to hell.
And maybe it’s just Darwin ’s theories at work; we’re culling
the herd by getting rid of the females too silly to evade the
predators and preventing reproduction of the idiocy into
another generation.

I’m sorry for both families. Sorry for Georgie-boy’s
parents who didn’t seem to recognize how much of a
danger their son had become. Sorry for Yeardley’s
parents who have lost a bright and promising daughter
who didn’t realize the level of danger from such a
self-centered freak. Nobody wins. And nobody learns
a thing.


Florida Cracker