June 23, 2004
Yeah, but Ronda never specifically said that the glass was broken, and she can't help it if that's the impression that the lying liberal media left you with...
MJ Malone questions Ronda “crawled across glass on my elbows” Storms’ veracity:
What feels like an urban myth has attached itself to Ronda Storms.She's been poor.
She's been abused.
Oh, baby, she's even lived in the Salvation Army and out of her car.
She's worked for two bucks an hour.
Bloody but unstoppable, she has crawled across glass, put herself through law school, and now, lucky us, graces the Hillsborough County Commission with her presence.
I may be wrong that all this is an urban myth, one of those stories that sound like they have just enough truth in them to be real. I hope I'm wrong because Storms herself has unloaded these morsels during outbursts - does she speak any other way? - at commission meetings.
......Storms' latest declaration of her hard life came last Wednesday as the County Commission prepared to kill one token of humanitarianism, a proposal to raise the wage of the lowest paid county workers, and employees who work for county contractors, to $9.97 an hour, or, for a 40-hour week, a $400 gross.
Storms flew into one of her best, perverse routines. This was the day she talked about the Salvation Army, the crummy jobs, the glass.
She attacked the sexual habits of people who had come to make their case before the commission, dredging up cheap shots about welfare queens and missing men.
......That's the bizarre part of Storms' shtick. If her life has been as hardscrabble as she says, you'd think it would make her compassionate to the struggle of others.
But compassion isn't in her vocabulary. If she survived to make $84,000 a year, other people can.
(It's regrettable that such sinecures are hard to nail down outside politics.)
If others can't make it, it's their fault. Poverty isn't an economic condition. It's a moral failing.
Some ears are still burning over Storms' big mouth. On Tuesday, I visited with the pastor of an east Tampa church, the Rev. W.F. Leonard. He belongs to HOPE, the group that sought the living wage. Leonard couldn't get over how little sympathy Storms had shown for the poor and homeless.
If she really had been living among them, he said, she'd know that homelessness affects every stripe of the ordinary and unlucky.
......There's a contradiction in Storms' telling and retelling her story. She says she believes in every individual working hard, getting no more breaks than anyone else, and finally achieving equality.
But her yapping suggests she believes she's suffered more than others.
It telegraphs a sense that her suffering has made her not equal, but special.
Now, call me silly, but isn't the St. Pete Times a newspaper? And don't newspapers occasionally do investigative research and report on the results? I mean, MJ did say (in a part that I cut) that she called Ronda's office, but that hardly counts as investigation. Let's find out how true Ronda's claims of hardship really are.
Posted by Norwood at June 23, 2004 01:09 PM