apropos of anything

In the last book of Madeline L’Engle’s Time Quartet, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Charles Wallace takes a trip through time to right a series of Might-Have-Beens in the hope of preventing a nuclear holocaust in his present. As I finished In Cold Blood this afternoon, the end of which dabbles in the murderers’ childhoods, I kept saying to myself, oh, if only child-Perry had had someone to take care of him and love him and give him attention, what Might Have Been.

I suppose that makes me a bleeding-heart liberal, focusing on the murderers like that, ostensibly to the disregard of the victims. Except that I don’t forget the victims. They were the Clutter family, Herb, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon, and they were each shot in the head for pretty much no reason at all. Nancy and Kenyon were children. The death penalty was exactly the right punishment for both Perry and Dick; their crime was heinous, premeditated, and, if you’ll forgive me, in cold blood. They deserved to hang, but that doesn’t mean I don’t read certain paragraphs and think, if only.

In high school, I read a short story about a woman who thought about what she would do if she were attacked by a rapist, how she would talk to him and get to know him because then he wouldn’t rape her because they would be friends. Of course that’s not true. The majority of rapes in this country are date rapes, perpetrated entirely by people who know and claim friendship with the victim, because rape is not about familiarity so much as control. I don’t remember the exercise behind reading the story, but I do clearly recall my teacher discussing the narrator’s naivete and lack of understanding.

And now, here I am, talking about kindness and familiarty, moments and might-have-beens, and how they affect crime… I wonder if that makes me naive. Is that what we bleeding-hearts are, naive? Do I not understand the way things truly are, am I over-simplifying the problem? Perhaps I am, but that doesn’t mean that I’m entirely wrong, either.

And serve Allah. Ascribe no thing as partner unto Him. (Show) kindness unto parents, and unto near kindred, and orphans, and the needy, and unto the neighbour who is of kin (unto you) and the neighbour who is not of kin, and the fellow-traveller and the wayfarer and whom your right hands possess. Lo! Allah loveth not such as are proud and boastful; [4.36]

Unto the neighbor who is of your kin and unto the neighbor who is not of your kin, show kindness. Unto everyone, show kindness. It is a command from God Himself.

I think Dick would have ended up executed or in prison for life regardless of his childhood, especially since Dick’s childhood was decent. Not great, but decent. He certainly had everything Perry lacked and wanted. It’s funny how he didn’t actually kill any of the Clutters but I still didn’t care one bit about his thieving, lying, animal-abusing, pedophilic ass ending up in The Corner. With Perry, I am glad he was caught, glad he was sentenced, glad that justice was served, and at the same time just a little sad that somebody couldn’t have saved him as a child.

And you see, the thing is, I have to be a bleeding-heart liberal. I can’t be anything else. I can’t relegate the poor to poverty, the starving to famine, the uneducated to illteracy. I can’t. I have to believe that for the most part, people aren’t born wanting to hurt others, that they didn’t just come that way, that kindness and attention can make real differences. I have to believe in the good ripples. It’s simply the way I’m built.

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