How could this happen, here?
Reluctantly, this morning I read the details of Tori Stafford's final hours. I read it because I'd rather be conscious of the evil in human nature than unconscious of it. Even though my father is a forensic pathologist and I'd heard more than my share of horrific rapes and murders (he worked on the Mahaffy/French murder cases), I was still shocked.
This is the kind of atrocity you hear about happening in the Sudan, not Southern Ontario. Twice in 20 years is too much to be coincidence. Once again, there will be outrage and calls for re-institution of the death penalty. But that won't solve anything. What I want to know is, why is our society creating these monsters? And why are our children being sacrificed to them?
And I don't know what to tell my 8-year old daughter about how to protect herself from potentially dangerous people. She already lives in a much more paranoid world than I grew up in. How could she not? With regular "lock-down" exercises at school and so on. I'm sure she doesn't know anything about the Stafford case, but she's very intuitive (at night at least) and I think she picks up on the collective vibe. Last night, she admitted to me that she's secretly afraid of everyone who is not family or close friends. A vestigial survival strategy, perhaps, but sad nonetheless. I explained the "Us and Them" psychology of our ancient ancestors, but that we have to be smarter than that now, because that's how wars start.
I was considering letting her walk to the school bus stop alone in Grade 4, but now I don't know. If we do get a dog, maybe we should get a big one.
This is the kind of atrocity you hear about happening in the Sudan, not Southern Ontario. Twice in 20 years is too much to be coincidence. Once again, there will be outrage and calls for re-institution of the death penalty. But that won't solve anything. What I want to know is, why is our society creating these monsters? And why are our children being sacrificed to them?
And I don't know what to tell my 8-year old daughter about how to protect herself from potentially dangerous people. She already lives in a much more paranoid world than I grew up in. How could she not? With regular "lock-down" exercises at school and so on. I'm sure she doesn't know anything about the Stafford case, but she's very intuitive (at night at least) and I think she picks up on the collective vibe. Last night, she admitted to me that she's secretly afraid of everyone who is not family or close friends. A vestigial survival strategy, perhaps, but sad nonetheless. I explained the "Us and Them" psychology of our ancient ancestors, but that we have to be smarter than that now, because that's how wars start.
I was considering letting her walk to the school bus stop alone in Grade 4, but now I don't know. If we do get a dog, maybe we should get a big one.