There were plenty of similarities between the senseless multiple murders of the Petit family and that of the Clutters. The motive was robbery. And in both situations there was none of financial windfall the miscreants expected.
The one difference was that among the Petits, there was a survivor - the father, Dr. William Petit II.. Of course, for a long time, Petiti probably wished he hadn't recovered from the beating the robbers gave him before raping and killing his wife and two teenage daughters.
Daily, he then attended both phases - guilt and sentencing - of the two murderers' trials. He even testified.
Few anticipated that he would make it back emotionally. He appeared drained. He was overweight.
But time can heal. He started a new chapter in his life by leaving medicine and operating a foundation for the victims of crimes. Freelance photographer, Christine Paluf, volunteered. Eventually they married. When son, William Petit III, was born, many in CT rejoiced. It was the kind of "happy ending" no one had predicted for this tormented man.
To New York Post reporter, Maureen Callahan, Petit noted that his flashbacks only last minutes, not hours or days. The amazing thing is that he was able to rebuild a life not far from the scene of the crime - in the CT area of Farmington. Some wondered if he should simply uproot and settle in another nation, change his name, and find a mission or some reason to stay alive.
The takeaway may be that healing is possible in-place. The Horror can be reconfigured into simply the past. Petit is among those demonstrating that the past doesn't have to pre-determine the present.
Suicide, both active and passive, used to be a private affair. Virgina Woolf put pebbles in her skirt and went to the cold river, alone. My mother didn't tell anyone she stopped taking her blood pressure meds and that was that. Now, checking out or the intention to do that is staged as high drama. Call it Theatre of the Deranged.
On live television,Vester Lee Flanagan IImurdered the anchor reading the news and a cameraman. He posted the video on his Facebook page. Then, he offed himself in his car.
Suicide, both active and passive, used to be a private affair. Virgina Woolf put pebbles in her skirt and went to the cold river, alone. My mother didn't tell anyone she stopped taking her blood pressure meds and that was that. Now, checking out or the intention to do that is staged as high drama. Call it Theatre of the Deranged.
Adam Lanza also created the drama of screaming little children before he checked out.
I have a hunch James Holmes expected a version of suicide by cop, which didn't happen.
There will many more high-drama suicides which are simultaneously homicides. The only way these can be prevented is for the media to stop covering them. The media won't do that, of course.
Stopping the media from making these deranged murderers famous might only happen if Donald Trump becomes U.S. President. He knows how to get things done. Several times already he has shown he can take on media, including the gang at Fox News.
Until something is done, we are all potential actors and actresses in someone else's suicide drama.
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| Hedgehog like echidna filled with ticks and Media Dragon Suffered Jervis Bay Sep 2014 |
Few see through this current craze. The exception is those in the legal sector. From the get-go, lawyers are trained to put on a face to meet the faces out there.
That ranges from the best fit of a persona for a blue-collar jury to the poker face at the negotiating table. Laterals prepare for job interviews by collecting and analyzing data about the law firm culture. Based on that, they put together an appropriate presentation of self.
The great thought leaders had no time for the myth of authenticity. William Shakespeare had down cold that all the world's a stage and we are all players on it. Sociologist Erving Goffman taught his student that even the most unsophisticated resident of a French village got it to put on different faces for meeting and greeting each social circle.
The Machiavellians among us, of course, will continue to leverage the concept of authenticity, though. That's what you do if you want influence and power in a society which has lost its ability to insulate itself from the field force of nutty barrowman memes.
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| Poetry of two verses Eager Eagles Sep 2014 Jervis Bay |
I am among those wondering if Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis is enjoying this 21st century version of Sweet Suffering. She refused to marry couples of the same sex. As USA Today reports:
" ... U.S. District Court Judge David Bunning found [Kim Davis] in contempt of court ... [and] placed her in the custody of U.S. marshals and had her taken to Carter County jail."
Davis may not be conscious of the joy involved in being a kind of martyr. But, I have a hunch, based on my own experience, it makes up for any inconveniences of jail life.
“We continue to be transfixed by upper-crust lifestyles in a primitive, almost unconscious way, equally covetous and condemning of all that glitters, just out of reach. What is absent, it seems to me, from our sense of the wealthy, is an understanding of their flesh-and-bloodness—of the fact that they, like Shylock, bleed when they are pricked and have miseries peculiar to them, against which immunity cannot be bought.”
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| Just Watching Big Brother at Jervis Bay Sep 2014 |
That post-catastrophe World is captured in the 2014 novel "A History of the Future: A World Made By Hand." The author is James Howard Kunstler. The biggest shock is how fragile the concept of law is. Next is the reality how it wouldn't take too many intersecting events to wipe out life as we have known it in the 21st century.
A writer, I would have to return to the manual typewriter I brought along for freshman year in college in 1963. Since there would only be candle-light, few of us hustlers would be able to pull all-nighters. Ambition would be limited by the slow transportation of horses and sleds. Instead of being preoccupied about socking enough away for retirement, we would have to focus on just staying alive.