Reply #4: Sometimes I avoid reading articles like this once I see the headline. Sometimes, I read the...

[Poll_Blind]

...articles anyway, maybe thinking I'll learn something about human nature- I dunno, maybe just for the sensationalism of it. A modern zebra looking back from the herd at the member the lions caught up with. I just don't know. Articles like this elicit a profound sadness and something that goes beyond the merely horrific...I mean....stabbing a child?

My girlfriend, she can't stomach things like this. She can't even bear to know things like this happen. I tell her it's ugly but sometimes we shouldn't turn away because awful things go on and if we pretend like they don't happen we're...it's like we're the people who didn't call the police while Kitty Genovese was being murdered. Like, at least in some small way there was some duty to at least be aware peripherally of what goes on in this world.

But I don't feel any wiser after reading this. I don't feel like I've done anything good, protected any Kitty Genoveses. I don't feel like I've learned a thing.

I just feel sorry for that little girl and her mother. I'm an atheist. In my world view, as much as I like romanticize otherwise, the unique nature of that little girl and her mother have been extinguished forever except for what harmonic of them is left reverberating with those who loved them. I grope for greater meaning and come up wanting.

What a terrible thing. May there one day be an end to such things. May the sun rise in the sky and shine, just once, on a world free of these horrors. It once did, long ago. Perhaps as distant in the past as its re-occurrence in the future.

PB