Good morning!
Yesterday evening, Diane Sawyer came on with a young lady who, as everyone in the US knows, was kidnapped as a child and forced to bear children for a mad man and live in his back yard, for years and years.
My husband turned off the station and declined to listen to this interview. You know, he was right. If he'd left it on, I'd probably have listened through indolence and low-level curiosity and participation in the sad details. But you know what? We do not have to listen to this.
We don't have to listen and watch the trial of a young mother for the murder of her little girl. We don't have to seeth with anger, nor burn for revenge. We were not there. We don't know what happened. As it turned out, the prosecution did not prove its case. Which is it obliged to do. Cases are not judged on whether or not we believe that such-and-such happened. They are determined on the prosecution's need to prove that the person charged is guilty. Obviously, it did not convince the jury. End of trial.
Let it go. Let the girl who was kidnapped, raped, and forced to bear children GO. Let her have her life and suffer what she had to bear, and get over it as best she may. Let Casey the mom go. If she murdered her child, our business with it --the trial--is over. Don't we have enough to do in our own lives, enough work, enough worrying, enough caring?
Sometimes I see a child in a store whom I believe is being seriously harassed by a caregiver. If I do nothing, I feel terrible about it. But, if I do anything, folks say it will be worse for the kid....I have devised a strategy. I wait for a lull in the haranguing. Usually it is fairly surreptitious so I'm not supposed to have over head. In the lull, I smile broadly at the child and say to the (usually) mother: "Your little girl is so cute." Usually this provokes a moment of shock in the mom, as she takes in the world outside her own skewed mentality. Then, most often, she says, sometimes grudgingly, "Yes, she is." Usually she adds a qualifier, "Sometimes."
"Well, I remember when my own kids went through stages, " I say, as we sort through clothes or dishes at the (usually) thrift store or grocery store. "They can really get to us, can't they?" By this time, you can often see the mom, who's had a break in her thinking, relax somewhat. Sometimes they even smile at the kid and seem to accept their situation a little more easily.
At a distance, that is the most we can do for our crazy world. Interfere a little in a way that might do a little bit of good, if only alleviating a bad situation for a very short while.
Listening to trash-talk on the television reminds me that Jesus says that bad deeds done vicariously are marked up against our own records. Oh-oh. Adios stories of serial killers, adult porn stories, thriller novels of detailed gore and lust and degradation. Adios, interviews of child victims of rape, and minute descriptions of the details of child murder. Of possible child murder. Somebody probably killed little Kaylee once, for sure....but how many times has she been killed since, in our minds?
What do you think? Am I wrong in this? YAZZYBEL
Not wrong!
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