Cindy and I were in Denver shortly after Christmas, 1996, when the JonBenet Ramsey murder was oh-so-briefly just a local story in the Rocky Mountain News. It soon became a national media obsession with enough steam to run for most of the past ten years. It’s back this week with an arrest.What a horrible thing for a young girl to be molested and murdered. What an unspeakable tragedy for her family.
But why is there so much interest in THIS girl, THIS crime? Is it because she was so rich, so perfect, so WHITE, so American? That’s it exactly.
Look at the reports about yesterday’s arrest. The very last line in the CNN article (the very last line for cryin’ out loud!) says that this guy traveled frequently to Thailand, “a country notorious for its child sex trade”. Eight words to cover thousands of broken lives and devastated souls which were housed mostly in yellow bodies or brown. Who tells their stories for ten minutes, let alone ten years?
In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible, a white family in Africa suffers a tragic loss which scars them for the rest of their lives. Yet some of those family members begin to understand that their loss finally unites them with the Congolese around them. Their loss is the world to them, but it is only one raindrop in the jungle of Africa’s grief.
Losing precious people is one thing we all have in common. White people, rich people, beautiful people don’t love their children more. Africans and Asians and South Americans don’t grieve their children less.
When we finally grasp this, we’ll DO something. And we’ll actually have something to say to the world.
(This was originally posted at my MySpace blog, which you may want to check out occasionally).
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1 response so far ↓
1 bartlmay // Aug 19, 2006 at 12:09 am
The death of Jon Benet is tragic. It is the type of story that needs attention. The part of the story that someone got into the house of the girl and now the girl is dead. Not the part of the story of the rich, white, perfect, American girl that is now dead.
Another tragic story is the pretty teenage girl that disappears under questionable circumstances. I wont go into that the whole reason she went missing was that she violated the rules given to her while she was in a foreign country. Or that no one would have heard of the story at all, much less than for a full year, if she wasn’t the rich, white, perfect, American girl whose family apparently used financial influence to get media attention when they didn’t get the action they wanted from the government.
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