Sunday, August 20, 2006

crashing on the shore...

Life is bizarre… things that I never could have imagined have come to pass…

It began with 9-11… That morning, it was incomprehensible… as a nation I don’t think we ever truly wrapped our heads around it … and then that grief was high jacked to serve other ends…

And then the war in Iraq…

And then, close to my heart’s home, Katrina and a diaspora that will forever mark the Gulf…

In my personal life… losses… strange losses and unexpected sadnesses…



And now…

I watch my hometown flashed across television and computer screens. People I’ve known all my life are giving interviews. Hamilton is infamous. An intense young man (when I knew him – not so young anymore) is now the subject of an even more intense media scrutiny.

John Karr’s confession and arrest and the resulting attention paid… I would like to turn it off… get some distance from it but until the DNA tests come back… I can’t. I knew John… not in some vague “oh yeah I’ve seen him around” kind of way but rather to say I knew him.

Shocked? It is impossible to articulate the contradictory emotions that surround this including my sense of unease… what should have been noted THEN? What could have been done to forestall this? He has crossed a boundary in the public’s mind. He has entered into the realm of the sub-human… He’s a monster now.

The truth is that he’s ill. So severely ill that the lives of others are wrecked and the greatest victims of that illness are the innocents who unfortunately capture his imagination … (Whether he is guilty of the JonBenet murder or not …) He is living in a dream that can only be a nightmare to those who fall into it.



Beyond this I think about the fact that there are so many missing children … so many not from “good” families that get lost from view. They don’t have the media eye… Amanda Berry and Gina de Jesus come to mind… there are so many others. How do we help them and their families? Can the suffering of the Ramsey family become an engine of helping others?