Loss for Words

I heard this incredible story today on the radio of a man who, days before his 40th birthday, decided he wanted to help someone. So he thought about how he could help people, what skills he possessed, and he thought that he would be good at locating something in this area he knew better then anyone in California. So he thought that an earth quake would happen, and he would help people, or a helicopter would be downed and he would help find it. As days passed, he realized there were no natural disasters coming and he would have to think more about how to help someone. So he logged onto the news and typed in "lost." The first thing to come up was a lost person report: a man and his wife murdered their landlords and kidnapped their daughter from their grandparents. They fled.

So the guy instantly knew what he was supposed to do, he was going to help find these people. After some communicating with the police, he realized that they had given up on the case and he was going to have to go for it himself. He took a vacation week from his work and got onto this new job he had taken on. He printed off some fliers and got to work. Long story short, he found them in 2 days and went to the local police who apprehended and arrested them. He spend some time with the family in jail, and as he spent more time with them he learned some things. The children were happy. They loved their parents. The parents did not seem like murderers or criminals of any type... they just seemed like parents. Then the children went back to their grandparents' (where they were kidnapped from), and upon seeing the grandparents' house the man remarked that it did not seem fit for children, and the grandparents were quite negative people.

At the offset of his mission, this man felt like a hero, like a knight riding in on a white horse: by the time he accomplished his goal he felt more like a nuisance, like he should not have been there, like he was breaking something.

There are so many nuances and details that I left out for the sake of length, but this seems to be reality. When we look into a situation without first living the situation we cannot in any measure understand the situation. At any glance of this story you would assume that this was perfect justice, but on some underlying level, something went terribly wrong. The conventional, easy rules of society can distance us from the reality of people. I cannot begin to wrap my mind around this concept entirely, but it seems to me that every time one man sees justice another sees cruelty.

And I'm not trying to condemn the conventional rules of society, though I know that they are flawed. I know that they protect us, and were at one point put into place for the betterment of society. But, again, even these rules that were put into place with the absolute best intentions ... someone will be cheated... someone will lose. And most of us will never hear about it.

There is this human factor in all of us. I was thinking about this the other day: what if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, what if someone was murdered, and every bit of evidence pointed to you, and you had no alibi. There would be nothing that you could do to get around the fate incurred upon you.

Sorry about the scatter brain...