I cannot imagine harming or taking the life of a child.
It's incomprehensible to be.
I don't care what the disorder. What the illness or even the insanity that would predicate such horrors.
In my city a few years back, a woman took her three children into the backyard, doused them with gasoline and set them and the shed she'd locked them in, on fire. She and her oldest son survived.
They just recently convicted her and her sentence is time in the state hospital. She'll be released back into society in as little as two years.
A man murdered his wife and two children and then set their home on fire. He has yet to be apprehended.
As a young girl walked to her elementary school one morning, she was kidnapped by a family friend. He took her to a nearby field, tortured, raped and strangled her.
This man had the audacity to even assist in the search for her, and was seen passing out flyers regarding her disappearance.
A man was found guilty recently, of taking his girlfriends toddler to a vacant area, dousing her with a flammable liquid and setting her on fire. He watched this child burn to death in his rearview mirror as he drove away. They say he is borderline mentally retarded. He now faces the death penalty or life in prison.
Then today ... today ...
A woman took her five children one by one, placed them in the bathtub and drowned them. She called her husband at work, then called the police.
They say she is suffering from post-partum depression.
I know there are hundreds, thousands more stories like these.
Missing children that may never be found.
Children locked in closets while siblings play in their own neighborhoods.
Boys and girls kidnapped and forced into child pornography.
Newborns left to die in garbage cans.
It hurts my heart ... I keel over in pain.
It goes far beyond anger for me. Far beyond the natural desire for revenge.
Nothing will make this right.
Don't get me wrong, I am pro-death penalty. But even that won't change the facts.
I live in a society that preens it's self on acts of doing good, when all the while the good they do is for their own glory. So that they can say, "I contributed to this charity or that charity."
We spend billions on what?
Freeways? The Military? Space? New shopping malls? A bigger, better housing tract? New prisons and mental hospitals? Bailing out other countries? Politicians?
Even that list is endless.
I don't have any answers. I don't know why this happens. I don't know how to stop this.
All I do know, is that I am angry and that it breaks my heart.
GlassPoet 06.20.01
