We Must Look Past The Horrors
Their faces stare at us from the covers of magazines, newspapers and always, relentlessly, the tabloids. Victims of violence. Many of them are children, the only truly innocent bystanders left among us.
The little beauty queen’s face is made up in that earnestly vacant way that wins trophies, modeling contracts and hard time in Detox. There seems to be nothing of the child about her and yet JonBenet Ramsey was a little girl. Little enough to be taken from her bed in her tiny nightgown and murdered in the basement of her own home while the rest of the household slept in false peace.
Something in her eyes transcends the heavy liner and clotted mascara. Something still innocent: trust.
The little boy from California had it, too. Photographs of Nicholas Green show a boy pleased with the whole wide world. Looking at his broad grin, it is almost impossible not to smile back.
But his death is the only reason we have for seeing his face. He was killed on a family vacation to Italy. There will be no more pictures of the little boy whose eyes danced bright with the anticipation of living.
It is the same anticipation, matured and confident, that is captured in photographs of Ennis Cosby. A boy who overcame dyslexia and the shadow of a famous father to become his own man. A young man who stopped alongside a seemingly safe stretch of American highway and was shot to death.
If a picture is worth a thousand words and 10,000 tabloid dollars, what do the pictures say about us? That we are an increasingly violent society both repelled by and drawn to a kind of impotent voyeurism? That we, living in the land of plenty, can neither share our good nor protect our innocent? That fame, money and love cannot shelter us from the random brutality of life?
They didn’t die for a noble cause or a deeply held conviction. They weren’t even particularly in the wrong place at the wrong time. Presumably, a roadside in Bel Air, a vacation rental car or one’s own small bed does not invite that kind of violence. At least, years ago, it didn’t. And when the unthinkable happened, we still had the ability to be shocked by it.
I recall the abduction and murder of a childhood friend as being one of the most singularly terrifying events of my early years. It wounded our neighborhood and community to the core.
But part of what made the crime so horrifying was its exceptional nature. Things like that simply didn’t happen. Not in Spokane, not even routinely in New York. Dead children’s faces didn’t stare at us from milk cartons and check-out lines. The pictures we saw were mostly reassuring.
Today, nothing shocks us for long. We can’t afford sensitivity. There are just too many faces, too many pictures. Are these the pictures we want to be remembered by? More than 25 years ago Martin Luther King Jr. wrote of “the appalling silence of good people.” That silence is still deafening. And yet, there are voices, actions that speak eloquently.
Reginald and Maggie Green donated the organs of their lost child so that other children might live. They have demonstrated a palpable faith in life by starting a new family. And they have forgiven their son’s still unknown killer. Bill and Camille Cosby have asked that the death of their son not become yet another opportunity for racial hatred. Their quiet grace has inspired temperance in others.
They do not deny their grief or excuse their children’s killers. But both families have been able to reconcile their fundamental belief in the goodness of life with crimes that beg to destroy it. They care about the pictures other children will see. They want the pictures we are creating to earn our children’s trust.
The Talmud says “we do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.” Look at the pictures. What do you see?
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Kathleen Corkery Spencer Special to IN Life