Really, Bill?

In all of the turmoil and grief over the Aurora shootings, surely our hearts go out most of all to the parents of the child victim, 6 year old Veronica Moser-Sullivan. At least, this is true for those of us who have hearts.

Bill O’Reilly has a bit of a different take on it:

I don’t want this to sound harsh to anybody, but the reason that these children were in the theater at midnight to see Batman was because their parents didn’t want to pay for babysitters because babysitters are expensive. So they take the children, the children fall asleep in the movie and the parent watches the movie. And the (six) year-old girl who’s dead – the mother of the girl was shot in the chest – you just heard her father. She survived.…The story about this is that the mother, the father – and you heard the father – took the six year-old to the midnight movie. And they did that, as I explained, ‘cause they didn’t want to pay a babysitter, because babysitters are 15 bucks an hour, OK? OK? And there you go. 

I have found that if you feel the need to say “I don’t want to sound harsh to anybody”, you probably should rethink what you are about to say. If what you really want to sound is loving and sympathetic, then you don’t tell somebody it’s their fault a loved one is dead. That’s not the way not to sound harsh. You say something like, “Oh, this is horrible; this is dreadful. Your poor baby! I’m so sorry this terrible thing happened. It should never be.” That might still not be comforting, but it isn’t likely to get you accused of being harsh.

You know why parents don’t leave their children home with a baby sitter? It isn’t just the money. Some parents prefer to be with their children. They don’t want to turn their children’s care over to other people. That doesn’t mean they need to hole up with the kid in a cave. They go places and do things and take their children along, because they like being with their children.

Some people are afraid to leave their children with a babysitter. We hear stories of abusive babysitters. Even babysitters who are kind can have poor judgement. Your teenage babysitter may mean well but be tempted to take the opportunity to make out with her boyfriend on the living room sofa while the kids set fire to the house trying to toast marshmallows. Worries like that make parents  just feel safer keeping their children with them.

Do you think that kind of worry is a little extreme? Your chances of experiencing a reported house fire in your life are 1 in 4. The chances that someone in your household will suffer an injury in a home fire in an average lifetime are 1 in 10. The chances that someone in your household will suffer an injury in a reported fire in an average lifetime are 1 in 89.

Your child is probably safer with a babysitter than you think, but “[c]hildren under age 6, the group most likely to be cared for by babysitters, are also those most likely to be victimized by them (figure 2). Children in this age group made up 60 percent of the victims of babysitter crimes in the NIBRS jurisdictions.”

Remind me again - what were the chances of being shot by an assailant in a movie theater prior to the Aurora shootings? For that matter, what are they now?

And if little Veronica had been left at home with a babysitter who turned out to be abusive or who panicked and couldn’t get her out of the house in a fire, would Bill O’Reilly be saying, “At least her parents didn’t take her with them to the movies where she could be shot by an armored gunman”? Yeah, right.

Why in the world would someone even think it is okay to talk about parents like this? They didn’t take their daughter hang-gliding or rock climbing; they took her to a movie. Yes, it was a midnight showing, but the worst they could reasonably have been expected to anticipate is that she would be crabby the next day. This goes beyond just the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy; this is just plain cruel.

Really, Bill. You don’t want to sound harsh? Then keep your mouth shut.

I Can't Breathe

Like everyone else in the country, I have been riveted by the story of Trayvon Martin, the beautiful young boy who went out for some Skittles and an iced tea and never came home again. It is particularly poignant for me because it comes months after the murder of a young member of my family, my cousin Al. Al was only two years older than Trayvon. Unlike Trayvon, Al did not go out to buy Skittles. He went out to buy drugs. Unlike Trayvon, Al was white. So unlike in the case of Trayvon, Al’s shooter, who was black, was arrested two days after the murder. 

I don’t blame Al for his murder, even though he was involved in an illegal transaction. The murderer had a grudge against him and would have used a bag of Skittles to lure him in if he could have. I don’t feel sorry for Al’s murderer. He is a person who saw murder as a defensible solution to an interpersonal problem, which makes him a menace to society. I want justice for my cousin. I think that’s the least he deserves.

I also want justice for Trayvon. I think that’s the least he deserves, too.

I have no idea what Trayvon’s parents are feeling, but on some level, I know what murder can do to a family. Murder turns the universe into a malevolent place. Murder is not just a sudden, horrible death, it's a personal, sudden, horrible death. Murder is intentionally cruel. Murder rips your heart out. 

It’s horrible when someone hated a person you love enough to consider that person not worthy of life. What must it be like when the murderer considered your loved one not worthy to live not because of who they were, but what they represented?  Murder turns the universe into a malevolent place when it’s caused by something, no matter how trivial or unworthy of blame, the victim did. Even more does murder turn the universe into a malevolent place when it’s because of who the victim was.

I look at Trayvon’s picture and I almost can’t breathe. There is at least hope for justice for my cousin, although he deserved so much more. He deserved to live out his life. Where is the hope for justice for Trayvon? He deserved to live out his life, too.

Wow

Back in my working days, I worked in a building next door to an elementary school. The waiting area had large windows, almost walls of glass, looking out at the school and the street. The week before Christmas 2002, shortly before the start of our two week break, we could see parents gathering for the school assembly next door. That meant we could also hear the squealing of brakes, followed by screaming, commotion, and in due time, sirens. 

Our janitor went to check on what had happened and came back with a sad story. A car had gone out of control and hit a mother pushing a stroller along the sidewalk, hard enough to knock the 11 month old out of the stroller. Rumor had it, and later turned out to be true, that the baby was dead.

The driver of the car did not stop but sped off, chased by another driver who got a license number to give the police. In due time Sheri McElveen was arrested and found to have a blood alcohol level of 0.27 (0.08 is legally drunk) and to have traces of cocaine and prescription drugs in her system.

For some reason that incident came to mind last week, and I vaguely wondered where McElveen was doing time.

This morning I saw this story in our local newspaper.

A woman convicted almost a decade ago of killing a toddler while driving drunk was arrested Tuesday and is accused by State Police of causing a head-on collision with a tow truck, again while driving drunk.
Tuesday’s crash occurred at 12:45 p.m. on Airline Highway near Berringer Foreman Road when Sheri McElveen, 52, crashed her Honda Accord into a tow truck while driving on the wrong side of the road’s median, an affidavit of probable cause says. . .

McElveen pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide, first-degree vehicular injuring and hit-and-run driving on Sept. 3, 2003. She was sentenced to a year in the Ecumenical House, a year of home incarceration, followed by five years probation.

I am not usually a person who complains about courts being “soft on crime” or who wants all criminals locked up and the key thrown away (that person would be my older brother). But really, a year in a halfway house for killing a child? Is that justice?

Wow.

A Conversation

Half of a conversation, anyway. As I was leaving the courthouse yesterday to head home after my shortest term of jury duty ever, I heard a man on a cellphone, apparently an attorney, having this conversation:

Attorney: I was told they had obtained a search warrant last week, but that it was never executed.

(Pause)

Attorney: Well then how did they get in your house?

(Pause)

Attorney: Did she sign a Consent to Search?

(Pause. Short sigh.)

Attorney: Well, that explains it then.

Wait! That's It?

This morning began my week of jury duty. Yesterday evening I began my preparations: making sure my jury summons was in my purse and my pocket knife was out, setting my alarm fifteen minutes earlier, and laying out an outfit that was comfortable but polished. My dark taupe chinos, white cashmere pullover, and denim jacket with a dragonfly brooch pinned to the lapel were supposed to indicate sufficient respect for the court while not irritating me all day long. 

When I arrived at the door, I ran into problems. I had to remove my belt, jewelry, and everything in my pockets and put them in a small box to be scanned along with my purse. I managed to set off alarms anyway and had to be hand scanned. Since I was wearing my raincoat on top of everything else, I had forgotten the brooch on my lapel, but more importantly, I realized two hours later, I had forgotten the ten metal buttons on the cuffs, pockets, and placket of the jacket itself. I made a mental note about tomorrow’s outfit: no belt, blazer with plastic buttons, keep my rings and watch in my purse until I go through security. 

The last time I had jury duty, it was in the old courthouse. The new courthouse opened in 2010. It has a first floor area called the Jury Management Office, with a reception area, a large Jury Assembly Room and a smaller room called the quiet room next door. A few hundred of us gathered in the Jury Assembly Room for orientation. The first order of business was a welcome from Judge Fields. The next order of business was a review of what qualifications were necessary to be a juror. One prospect who had not resided in the parish for a full year was excused. So were several full-time students and one person over the age of 70 who did not want to remain, although two other 70-somethings elected to stay. The next group to be dismissed were convicted felons, persons under indictment, persons with physical or mental impairments that would affect their ability to serve, and people with hardships. They were all called up at once so the rest of the group would not know which people fell in which group. That didn’t stop me from playing “guess the felon” with the man in the next seat. Four or five people got sent back to sit with the rest of us, so I guess their hardships didn’t pass muster.

Courthouse under construction in 2009

Rendering of the courthouse from 2009

After getting our parking tickets validated, we got to watch an educational video about jury service. Before showing it to us the jury coordinator told us that the video made reference to being able to wait in the public library, but they don’t allow jurors to do that anymore. According to her, a homeless woman who hangs out in the library had spent so much time watching the coordinator talk to jurors that one day she was able to convince all of them they were being sent home.  

I love that story. I don’t know if I believe that story, but I love that story.

Once the orientation was done, we still had about an hour before lunch. A movie was being shown in the main room, so I escaped to the quiet room with my Kindle. Around 11:45 we were called back to the main room.

“If I call your name, you may leave for lunch and return at 1:15,” the coordinator announced. She called several dozen names, none of which were mine. I hoped the next group wasn’t going to have to wait until 1:15 for our turn at lunch.

The next group, it turned out, was being thanked for their service and sent home for good. I listened as the coordinator reeled off a list of names, none of which was mine. Then I heard my first name, for the first time that day. When she started spelling my last name*, I realized that was it. I was done for the week. I was done for the next two years, actually, because one thing made clear in orientation was that no matter how short your service, if you got a summons and showed up, that counted just as much as serving the whole week.

So my week of jury service that was going to provide several blog posts is over, just like that. The thanks of a grateful nation, well, grateful city-parish, are mine, along with a promised twelve dollars plus mileage. “Must be nice,” said my husband, who had to stick it out for a whole two and a half days.

I don’t know. I’ve been called for jury duty three times and have yet to serve on a jury. I was looking forward to it, largely because I would not be allowed to listen to my husband discuss the local news for a whole week. 

Maybe it’s the way I was dressed?

*Nobody knows how to pronounce my last name. No two people in my family say it alike.

Jury Duty, the Sequel

Remember when I wrote about my husband’s week of jury duty, and concluded “I know if I were ever charged with a crime, I’d want a jury that was serious and motivated to do a good job and not wishing they could be with their son at college or worried about being fired. Now that I’m retired, I could be that juror”?

Be careful what you wish for. This afternoon I received a summons to jury duty the same week my husband reserved us a cabin for an overnight stay in a state park. “You have to call right now and get them to change it,” he said, speaking of the jury duty, not the cabin.

“Can’t we just change the reservation for the cabin?” I asked.

“No, we can’t. We’ll lose our money.”

I dutifully call the court and am told I should fax them a letter saying I had already made vacation plans, and fax any proof I had that we had done so. So hubby hands me the email confirming the reservation, which clearly states that we can cancel or transfer the reservation for a $10 fee. 

“But you have to do that months ahead,” he states, erroneously. The email says 15 days. The reservation is something like three weeks away. (To be fair to hubby, he is struggling with our income tax and a little distracted.)

So I change the reservation, paying the extra $10 with my debit card. The customer service representative is apologetic, but the rules are the rules. I suspect they have had too many experiences of people making reservations and changing their minds or just not showing up.

The summons is interesting. It is a mix of archaic and modern language: “Bring this summons with you herein.  Fail not, by order of the court” preceded “No shorts, no tank tops, no flip flops, no exceptions.” Newspapers are not allowed, but cell phones and laptops are. Nobody has ever been known to read the local news on a cell phone. It's not like they have an app or anything.  I guess this means I can bring my iPad or e-reader, though.

It also says in bold print, “Any and all self defense weapons brought into the courthouse must be surrendered and WILL NOT be returned.” It’s not a self defense weapon, but I need to remember to leave my little Swiss army knife at home. I’m also not allowed to bring a camera, video camera, tape recorder, work tools, or chemical spray. That makes sense, except maybe the “work tools” part. I can understand them not wanting you to walk around the courthouse with a screwdriver or sledge hammer, but is a protractor a “work tool”?

I will have an account of my week of service when I am done. If this time goes the way the previous two did, it will be a very boring account.

Jury Duty

My husband has jury duty this week. From all the moaning he’s doing, you would think he’s about to ship out to Afghanistan for an indefinite tour of duty. Keep in mind, hubby has never had jury duty before. I’ve had it twice, including the week my son was going off to freshman year of college in another state. So you can imagine how sympathetic I am.

As I may have mentioned before, hubby, like me, is retired. The times I had jury duty, I was employed and had to cancel clients. Since after the first day of jury duty you may or may not have to return and if you do return you may or may not have to stay all day, it was hard to know what to tell my employer about when to expect me and who to cancel. Employers, at least mine, also seem to have a funny attitude toward jury duty, one that can be summed up as “You mean you’re too stupid to know how to get out of this?” Of course, they don’t exactly put it that way.

Hubby, on the other hand, is down to waxing the furniture as a way to fill his time, so you think he’d be jumping for joy at the idea of having something to do, but he’s not. For one thing, they won’t let him bring coffee or snacks into the jury room, although there is a little cafeteria in the courthouse. He did bring a book.

In neither of my two stints at jury duty was I selected for a jury. The first time, I got as far as being interviewed as a potential juror in a tort case, but was rejected by the  plaintiff’s attorney. The second time, I had actually been called to jury duty a few weeks earlier, but my boss complained that week was bad for me to be out and asked if could get it moved to another time. The problem is, when you do that, you have to show up at the time they reschedule, which was, as I mentioned above, the week my son was leaving for college. Thanks, boss. Fortunately, my son had to leave on Thursday and all juries needed for the week were filled by people who were not me by Wednesday evening, so I got to go embarrass him on his first day on campus after all.

That’s the down side of jury duty. In all likelihood, you are going to sit around in a big room with no coffee being excruciatingly bored while attorneys work out plea bargains. After the first day, you might get told to call the next day and see if you have to come back, or you might be dismissed early in the day or early in the week, but you can also be kept waiting around all day. The powers that be can’t tell you that the attorneys are trying to work out a plea bargain because if the attempt fails and a jury is called, that knowledge might prejudice the jury against the defendant.

On the other hand, you could be like my former co-worker who got selected as a juror in a murder case and be sequestered for two weeks. From what I am able to tell browsing the newspaper, there are no big cases coming up in court this week, so I think hubby is safe.

I know if I were ever charged with a crime, I’d want a jury that was serious and motivated to do a good job and not wishing they could be with their son at college or worried about being fired. Now that I’m retired, I could be that juror. 

I just don’t like the part about no coffee.

Baby Steps

Years ago, I met a group of online friends through a Get Organized interest group on AOL. As AOL went through changes and the message board disappeared, we became an email support group and then Facebook friends. As we supported each other through project after project - decorating, de-cluttering, dieting and/or exercising, finding new careers and getting our children through their teens, our unfailing mantra was “baby steps”. There was no project so big or daunting that it could not be broken down into small steps and achieved a bit at a time. For us, baby steps were a useful tool to achieve worthy goals.

In the last few days, it has occurred to me that baby steps can be just as useful in taking you to places you don’t want to go. Like most of the rest of the country, I have been riveted (horrified, but riveted) by the sex abuse scandal at Penn State. (Warning: that link contains disturbing references to child sex abuse.) I have been particularly interested in the disagreements over whether Coach Joe Paterno did enough in 2002 by reporting what he heard from Mike McQueary to Athletic Director Tim Curley and VP for Finance and Business Gary Schultz. Why didn’t he call the police? Why didn’t he insist McQueary call the police?

I can see how it happened, though. By the time McQueary told Paterno, the immediate emergency was over. So even if Paterno’s first thought was, “Mike, you’ve got to call the police right now”, I can understand a little voice saying, “Maybe I should give Curley a heads-up first. What if he gets calls from the police or the press and has no idea what’s going on?”

And once the decision was made to tell Curley and Curley set up the meeting with McQueary and Schultz, I can understand Coach Paterno thinking it was all being taken care of, and letting it go. One little baby step leading to the next.

I can understand the chain of events, but the problem is, nothing got done and Jerry Sandusky was able to spend nine more years victimizing boys. When a logical seeming chain of events leads to a horrific outcome, something is wrong with the logical seeming chain of events. There were a lot of people who knew about bits and pieces of what Jerry Sandusky was doing for years, and yet nobody stopped him.

I can think of times in my own life when baby step by baby step, I talked myself out of good deeds I meant to do or into bad decisions. I can empathize with Coach Paterno. Most of the time when I hear people say, “I can see myself doing that” the unspoken end of that sentence is, “so it was okay to do”. I see it differently. I can see myself doing that, but that doesn’t make it right. It just means that you don’t want to use me as a moral exemplar. I’m not going to hold up liquor stores or kick the cat, but if I wander into a moral gray area, I might wander back out on the wrong path.

So, yes, I can see how it happened, but that doesn’t make it right. Nine more years of victims makes it very far from right. Sometimes we do the very human, understandable, wrong thing, and need to live with the consequences. Sometimes we get there by baby steps.

Blindsided

To Branson from south Louisiana is a long trip. With stops, it takes about 13-14 hours. The bus we took on our recent trip was new, only 90 days old, and equipped with plugs at each seat for charging electronic devices, and monitors every few seats for playing DVD’s. So for most of the way there and back, I was able to amuse myself with games on my iPad, music on my iPhone, and an occasional glimpse at the movies everyone else was watching. Even though I only watched the last half hour each of  The Pacifier and RV, I had no trouble following the plots.

The one movie I was happy to watch all the way through, even though I’d seen it before, was The Blind Side. As I have mentioned before, I’m a sucker for sappy sports movies, and The Blind Side is better than most. I had forgotten the line toward the end, though, when Leigh Ann Tuohy talks about the murder of a young man from the same project where Michael Oher grew up. The young man had played football back in high school, just like Oher. She concludes, “That could have been anyone. That could have been my son Michael.”

That was my cousin Al. No, he didn’t grow up in a housing project and I don’t know if he ever played football, but on June 28 of this year, three months short of his 20th birthday, he was shot to death. It was a premeditated homicide; the shooter arranged with a friend to set up a drug transaction with my cousin and then shot him. The motive for the shooting had nothing to do with drugs. Al wasn’t the one dealing; he was making a buy so he and some friends that were with him could party. It’s the same thing many of my peers did in their younger days before they got some sense and grew up to pretend to their kids that they never did anything of the sort. I suppose if drugs hadn’t been the lure he could have been shot going to church. The important thing is, he did not deserve to die.

So when I heard the forgotten lines about the murder in the projects, I was blindsided.

I don’t think I ever met Al. Technically he is not my cousin. He’s my stepmother’s great-nephew, the son of her younger brother’s older daughter from his second marriage. My family doesn’t bother with such picky distinctions, though. We’re like the Olive Garden, if you’re here, you’re family. 

I’m not sure I ever met his mother, although I have met her younger sister. By the time my uncle remarried I was living far from home and contact with him was slight. I grew up with my uncle’s children from his first marriage, but I’ve lost touch with them over the years, too, although one of them is a Facebook friend. The impact Al’s death has had on me, other than the shock produced by anyone being murdered, and the sorrow of anyone dying so young, has been indirectly through its impact on the siblings and nieces and nephews I know and love. They were blindsided, too. This was someone my nieces and nephews grew up with just like I grew up with his aunt and uncles. This is something they are still trying to make sense of. This was very close to home.

I’ve known other young people who died. We’ve known three young men around my son’s age who died in car accidents, one of whom was the son of a co-worker and a schoolmate of my son. My boss’s daughter died of an aneurysm. Another co-worker’s son died of a gun accident. The father of one of the young men who died in a car wreck said something that will stay with me forever. “You worry about them whenever they go out the door, but you never really expect to hear that something bad happened to them.”

You may worry about crime, but you never expect murder to happen to someone you know. When it does, you’re blindsided.

Blame

There are different degrees of misplaced blame. There's the kind where an accident gets misattributed as an avoidable action. Say, for instance, the cat runs in front of you as you are heading to the door, and you step on the cat's foot. Or some part of the cat, it's hard to be sure, since it all happened so fast. It's also hard to be sure that blame is in this case misattributed.  That cat has been under your feet all day long. Shouldn't you have been watching out for him?

Then there's the kind where you get blamed for something someone else did. There was the time several years ago when my husband blamed me for paying some personal bills online out of the joint checking account, causing checks for household bills to bounce. Actually, they didn't bounce. The reason we knew about the whole snafu was that we got a letter from the bank telling us they had paid the bills anyway, and charged the amount to his Visa. Reason enough for him to be irate, but I was puzzled, since I remembered setting up my bills to be paid out of my account, not the household account.

When I looked online at the transaction history, I discovered that it showed I had set up the payments to come out of my account, and that the error was the bank's. As I found out when I called them, their computers had been down in the wake of Hurricane Gustav, so they keyed in the upcoming bill pay transactions themselves, using the default account that they had on file. They assured me they would transfer the money appropriately and cancel all fees. I informed my husband of this conversation calmly and politely, for those definitions of "calmly and politely" meaning that no actual weapons were used.

The worst kind of misattributed blame, however, is the kind in which you get blamed  for doing something that never actually happened. The day that I stepped on D'Artagnan, I let my husband know what had happened so that we could keep an eye on the cat to see if it started limping. The cat meanwhile was climbing the six foot tall bookcase, but Truffle hadn't shown any signs of his broken bone until it got infected, so I didn't want to take chances. Hubby looked D'Artagnan over and noticed a claw that was poking up perpendicular to his paw, and promptly concluded that the bone was broken and the digit would have to be removed and it was All My Fault, even if the cat did run under my feet. 

When the vet saw the cat the next day, she told me the broken claw would grow back and added, "Sometimes they develop a husk that sheds." She assured me that there were no broken bones and that D'Artagnan was in great health otherwise.

Keep in mind, this was two days after I had been accused of letting the cat out of the house when the cat was actually in the house all along. So you can imagine how cheery I felt about being blamed for the broken bone that wasn't broken. Fortunately for hubby, he was at a workshop on professional ethics and did not return until I had had some time to calm down. I even was calm and polite (see above) when I pointed out to him that he tends to make decisions without having all the facts, or even recognizing that he doesn't have all the facts.

I realize that my husband isn't the only person who thinks all the facts he has are all the facts there are. That's pretty standard human behavior, including my pretty standard human behavior. Something of the sort has been displayed on the local sports message board, Tiger Droppings, now that the two football players accused of battery in a local bar fight are being brought before the grand jury.

A few days ago, it was announced that no traces of the victim's DNA were found on any of 49 pairs of shoes belonging to the accused that had been seized on a warrant last month. The DA described the DNA results as "inconclusive", but they were actually conclusive: there was no match, not even a partial one, to the victim's DNA on any of the shoes. What the DA meant by "inconclusive" was that the lack of DNA does not clear the suspect, because they don't know if the shoes he was wearing were among the ones confiscated. Apparently there are witnesses who say the accused is the one who kicked the victim while he was down on the ground and others who say they saw the accused at the time of the fight and he was not involved. So now the DA is bringing all the witnesses before the grand jury, where they will be under oath and facing perjury charges for lying.

Reading the messages on TD reminds me that there is yet another, more pernicious form of blame: blaming the victim. Much is being made of the victim's behavior prior to his being kicked while on the ground: he allegedly stalked his ex-girlfriend, who ultimately got a restraining order on him, he is shown on videotape arguing with one of her friends at the bar and eventually pushing her, he is alleged to have thrown the first punch in another altercation, causing him to be thrown out of the bar before the fight in the parking lot. He's not much of a role model for today's youth, but once he was on the ground, helpless, he did not deserve to be kicked in the head.

At least the criticism directed at the victim, however, is directed at his pugnacious behavior, known and alleged.  It is not of the "this would never have happened if he hadn't been in a bar at that hour of the night to begin with" variety. The criticism directed at the accused, however, is. When asked to reflect on the possibility that he may be innocent, being blamed for a crime that someone else committed, many posters are responding with variations of, "If he hadn't broken curfew and been in a bar at that hour of the night, this would never have happened to him." That's an argument that sounds eerily familiar. If you're charged with a crime you didn't commit, it's not because eye witness testimony is faulty; it's not because you were the most recognizable face in the crowd; it's not because of racial prejudice (that never happens here in the South); no, it's because bad things never happen to people who weren't asking for it by being where they shouldn't be and when. Never mind that you have no way of knowing "where you shouldn't be and when" until the bad things happen.  Never mind that bad things happen to people at two in the afternoon.

I understand the desire to learn from other people's mistakes. No one wants to be the victim of a crime. No one wants to be falsely accused of a crime. If you can trace the sequence of events that led to another person's predicament, you can figure out where to break the chain before it leads to your being in the same predicament. It's a short step from there to "He shouldn't have been so pugnacious". "He shouldn't have been out late drinking." 

We never know the entire sequence of events. The facts we have aren't all the facts there are. Given that we are human and limited, the facts we have are never going to be all the facts there are.  That's something to think about before placing blame.

A Pall Hangs Over the City

Two, in fact. Last week, a fire began burning in a marsh to the east of New Orleans. Usually such fires are allowed to burn themselves out, since they don't pose a threat of spreading to homes and businesses, and it's hard to get into the marsh to fight the fire. As days passed, the smoke became a serious hazard to those with allergies and asthma. Yesterday evening, the smoke began clouding the air over Baton Rouge, roughly 80 miles from the marsh as the crow flies. An acrid smell hung in the air as John and I left the house to go to dinner.


This morning, helicopters are battling the fire.


Another pall has been hanging over Baton Rouge for the past several weeks, this one due to a bar fight resulting in serious legal charges being filed. Two weeks ago several LSU football players, drinking in a local bar after curfew, became involved in a bar fight. Several people were injured, two of them with fractured bones. Two LSU players, one the starting quarterback, have been charged with second degree battery. That much everyone agrees on. What happened next is the subject of dispute and conjecture.


One of the victims insists that the team quarterback, JJ, is the person who kicked him in the face while he was down on the ground, causing a fractured maxilla and other injuries. His story is confirmed by the victim's girlfriend. There is a blurry video of the fight in the parking lot taken with a cell phone which shows a tall man in black kicking a figure on the ground. There is also recently released security video taken inside the bar before the fight started showing JJ wearing a light colored shirt. However, there is a "second kicker", in a light shirt, in the video but he seems to be wearing shorts and possibly is of a different race. With the poor lighting and poor video quality, it's hard to tell.


Another complication is that the victim's ex-girlfriend obtained a restraining order against him a few days after the fight, claiming that he is harassing her and her friends. The bar video does show the victim arguing and getting physical with a young woman in the bar. Two bar employees have told the press that the victim took a punch at someone in the bar before the fight started outside. The victim's account of himself has been that he intervened in a fight that was already occurring to help someone in trouble.


The two players who have been charged with battery are out on bond but have been suspended from the team. Sides are being taken, and on the local sports message board, Tiger Rant, have been labelled Team Sweep and Team BRPD Sweep. One side believes that by being out in a bar after curfew, the players were asking for trouble. One side believes the Baton Rouge Police Department are behaving incompetently. As often happens in such cases, the murky gray area between the two sides is rapidly being ignored.


Let me be clear: when I say, "gray area", I am not proposing that there is any moral gray area regarding kicking someone who is down on the ground. He may have been spoiling for a fight, he may have mistreated his ex-girlfriend, he may have bit off more than he could chew, but he did not deserve to be kicked in the face while he was helpless.


No, I am referring to the murky gray area that is human memory and eye witness testimony, and the murkier gray area of how do you treat people who have been accused but not yet tried for crimes. The rule "presumed innocent until proven guilty" is a rule of courtroom law that does not have to apply to the university and the football team. There isn't any good answer that I can see to the question of whether the two players should have been suspended. People of good sense and good faith can be found on either side of the issue. If nothing else, they can be suspended for breaking curfew, but if that were all that had happened, it is likely they wouldn't have been.


Then there is that notoriously tricky form of evidence, eye witness testimony. The victim is sure that JJ is the one who kicked him, but was he really in a position to tell? He was down on the ground with someone kicking at him, it may have been hard to tell just who. He may be convinced that the most identifiable person in the group was the one that kicked him, even though he couldn't really know. His girlfriend's memory of events may be completely independent of his, or it may not. It may have been shaped by hearing him say, "Remember how JJ kicked me next?" or some such.


The memory of the accused may be equally fuzzy. JJ insists that he didn't kick anybody. That may be true. That may be a conscious lie. That may also be his memory of the truth. It's not impossible that alcohol and adrenalin interfered with his memory of events, and that what he remembers is what he presumed he would or would not have done in such circumstances or what he wanted to think he did in such circumstances.


It is sad to think that a guilty person may go free because reasonable doubt of his guilt can be raised or that an innocent person may go free but with an acrid cloud over his head because he can never be completely exonerated. That's the reality of our justice system. We more often than not have to deal with cases that are not open and shut. Often we deal with them by pretending that in fact they are open and shut, and that the people who can't see it just have smoke in their eyes.


Update, September 2: A tropical storm-in-the-making is now headed toward us. It could put the fire out, along with our power.

Bullseye

After lunch we had one of those out and about errand running sessions where each task seems to suggest the next. One such task was buying new water bowls for the cats, one for inside and one for outside. As we left Pet Smart, I recalled that I needed razor blades, which we could buy at Target, just two parking lots away. 


I found the razor blades, in the eight pack size, but could not get the box off the rack. The blades were packed in a cardboard box that has a tab with a hole the size of a standard hole punch in it. The hole slips over a metal rod, and you used to be able to pull a box off the rod. This particular rod, however, formed  a closed loop with the addition of a plastic cap connecting the lower and upper rods. A passing shopper called my attention to a sign that said that some items were in locked displays and that I would need a sales team member to assist me. 

Imagine a knitting needle running through the hole. Now imagine the knitting needle bent into a narrow "U" with plastic connecting the two legs.

I used the handy red phone to call for help. A team member, looking suspiciously like a stock clerk, showed up, listened to my problem, and explained that he would have to call someone else. That person arrived, and told me he would have to get the one remaining key, which was all the way across the store.


As I waited for him, I found myself wishing that I had followed my first impulse, which was to rip the box off the rack and put it in the cart with my other items. It wouldn't have been too hard to tear from the edge of the tab to the hole.

It wasn't too hard to rip the box like so, which would have made it fall off the rod.

When the team member (not my term, that's what Target calls them) showed up with the key, he apologized for the delay and explained that since that one style of key unlocks all of the merchandise security features, like tags on clothing, some team members have been stealing the keys and using them to steal merchandise from the stores.


Okay, let's recap. In order to keep customers from stealing $20 grooming supplies, Target has installed display racks which require a key to get the items. The key in question also unlocks security devices on even more expensive items, making the keys themselves subject to theft. In the meantime, frail 64 year old ladies like me can defeat their security system pretty easily, when it comes to razor blades. Remind me again, when politicians talk about running government like a business, why do they say it like it's a good thing?


So now I am faced with what passes for a moral dilemma around my house. In the future when buying razor blades at Target, do I wait five minutes for someone to show up with the key, or can I just tear the box off the rack and pay for it at the counter with the rest of my items?

Wave of Sorrow

Last Friday I was driving to a doctor appointment when I was suddenly hit by a feeling of depression. It was a mix of sadness, hopelessness and pointlessness that seemed totally unconnected to anything going on in my life. The appointment was a routine one for a Boneva infusion, not for illness. After the appointment I was going on to meet friends for lunch at a favorite restaurant and then to pick up my badly-missed laptop from the Apple Store and hang around to buy an iPad2. So why were my feelings so out of line with the day I had planned?


At that point my unconscious, which had been frantically trying to get my attention for a few minutes, broke in and reminded me what had happened earlier that morning. I had awoken to the radio and heard something about tsunami warnings in Hawaii. I found my husband, up early doing his laundry, and asked if he knew what had caused the worry about tsunamis in Hawaii, and that's when I found out about the earthquake that had hit Japan. Unlike most people, I was not glued to the news that morning while I organized the details of my day, but it wasn't hard to figure out that large dense population plus island location plus earthquake equals disaster. I wasn't prepared for the scope of that disaster, but I don't think anyone stateside was at that point.


Later that morning when I saw my sister's one word Facebook post, "CRAP!", I remembered that my nephew, who is in the Army, had just been sent to Hawaii. (Later that day he texted that he was okay.)


The incident reminded me of the last time I had sensed a disturbance in the force.  On June 11, 2001, two days before my 54th birthday, I woke up with that same feeling of sadness, hopelessness and pointlessness, and again, there didn't seem to be any reason for it. I was looking forward to my birthday. It was Monday, but I generally didn't take Mondays that badly. Only later, driving to work and hearing that Timothy McVeigh had been executed earlier that morning did I understand what had hit me. Not only was the sorrow and outrage of the Oklahoma City bombing brought back to me, but also sorrow for McVeigh.


Let me explain that. Despite my reservations about capital punishment in general, I can't dispute McVeigh's execution. If anyone is going to get the death penalty for a crime, a mass murderer of 168 people, nineteen of them children, should be the one. My thoughts about McVeigh do not run along the lines of "the poor baby". My sorrow was more a generalized sorrow for any young person who makes choices that ultimately force society to protect itself from him. I wonder if there was some point at which he could have been put on a better path, some person who could have intervened, some set of circumstances that would have averted the entire tragedy and spared all those lives. You can't reason with or influence tectonic plates. I would hate to think that people are ultimately just as driven by fate and impersonal forces. 

The empty chairs, Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial

How About If I Don't Talk Like a Pirate Day

View from Fortress de San Felipe Bacalar, built in 1729 to protect the pueblo from pirates

Friends on Facebook tell me tomorrow is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I think I'll sit this one out. Maybe I'll wait for Talk Like a Mugger Day, or Talk Like a Home Invader Day, or even Talk Like a White Collar Criminal Day.

Modern day piracy costs shipping companies an estimated $13 to $16 billion a year, with reported pirate incidents happening at a rate of 20-30 per month. When crew is held for ransom, it costs an average of $120,000 per person to free them. Eventually these costs are going to get passed along to the people buying goods being shipped. Beyond the financial costs, there is the trauma to the crew and their families to consider. Even those who have never been attacked by pirates must be worried about the possibility.

Why is it that everything seems more romantic if it happens on a ship? If someone holds you at gunpoint in the street, you aren't going to see the romantic side of it, but put the same someone on a ship, replace the gun with a grenade launcher, and have the target be someone else, and suddenly it's all good fun.

Oh, wait, it's supposed to be the pirates of old we want to talk like. Yeah, that makes it better. I'm sure they were much nicer people, due to the influence of living with all those parrots, or something. Okay, you can't mow people down with a cutlass as fast as you can with automatic weapons, but the mind set is the same. "You have it and I want it" just isn't romantic to me, whether it's coming from Bluebeard, modern day Somalis, or Bernie Maddoff.

So, matey, talk like a pirate all you want, just leave me out of it.