That Which Does Not Kill Us...

POTENTIAL TRIGGER WARNING....SENSITIVE TOPICS HEREIN.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you. – Friedrich Nietzsche

So, there is a registered sex offender living next door. All that separates our house from where he lives is a hedge and the driveway into the cemetery. I know he is there because we received the mandatory letter from the police department with most of the relevant information. I looked him up on the registry and, to get the more unpleasant details out of the way early, this is what I found out: he is a violent offender whose victim was 12 years old. He is a level 3 risk and was charged with forcible compulsion. Quick searches online revealed that he plead out, which explains why he only received five years. He will be 34 this month. He is mandated to attend anti-violent and anti-aggression counseling. He is prohibited alcohol and is not allowed to drive. He has a curfew.

This particular type of crime repulses me to no end. I would wager than any decent human finds it be one of the worst things we can imagine. The violation of a child and the utter destruction of that child’s innocence are beyond our ability to comprehend on any rational level. Regardless of how horrific his own background might have been, there seems to be no possible way to excuse his behavior. It wasn't a mistake, as a drunk driver might say. He didn't do it to feed his starving family, as a thief might say. He wasn't a mislead youth, as a vandal might say. It wasn't self-defense, as a murderer might say. His behavior is the action of a depraved human being who – at our kindest – we can say has an illness of the brain. None of the public documentation indicates this to be the case at all, but I am willing to concede that it is possible. Even that, however, is not enough for me to feel anything but disgust. As a woman living in a rape culture, as a human being with a heart, as someone who was once a child…I just cannot shake off the utter revulsion I feel when I consider what he did. I try not to.

All of this leads me to an interesting place of discussion. Our justice system is a flawed thing, no doubt. But it is the system that we have and I’m not sure I have a better system in mind to replace it with if I could. So, we have to fight it when it is unfair, and we have to make do with what it gives us. This man is on probation and living next door in a neighborhood where the school bus stops directly across the street from his residence. Young girls, female runners, and countless walkers flow through the cemetery steadily as it is a great place to get away from roads and traffic. This is frightening to me. All of it. Our justice system says that he has paid his dues. He should be, in some ways, just another citizen with a couple of extra hoops through which he must jump. But even the documentation identifies him as having a “high risk of repeat offense” and acknowledges that “a threat to public safety exists.” The recidivism rate of sex offenders has always been thought to be high. This is public information. So, what do we do?

I don’t mean on a personal level. I am always careful of my person and now will be more so. I’m fairly certain that JDB won’t actually run him over with the car. His house is easy to avoid and foreknowledge is forewarned. Not for nothing, this is why they tell us he is there. For our protection and the protection of our children. 

But, (if you are feeling up to it), spend a few moments reading the comments on this kind of story anywhere on the Internet or listening to people discussing a crime of this nature and the barbarism is truly shocking. So many terrifying things come from those who are angry and feel helpless when encountered with a story of the abuse of a child, sexual or otherwise. When society isn't victim shaming, its collective heart breaks and its blood boils to contemplate, in any way, crimes of a sexual nature.  It is a truly damaging crime that is all too prevalent and under-reported in a culture that seems steeped in factors that feed it. But the violent threats and suggestions of how to solve the problem of the rapist are rarely palatable and often are disturbing in and of themselves. That said, I also firmly believe that the people who let such suggestions enter their public discourse could never actually follow through. It is a coping mechanism. I have heard it as such, I understand it as such, I have even had such thoughts myself.

But that does leave us with the very real dilemma borne out of a general quandary regarding what we actually can and should do. On one hand, he paid his dues (regardless of whether or not I think it was enough) and as long as he continues to do what he is supposed to do, he should be allowed to continue on unmolested. That’s what makes people like us better than people like him. We can rise above our primal instincts which call for him to suffer unendingly for what he has done. We have to believe in the system of a civilized society where we understand that if we gaze too long into the abyss, we eventually become one with the abyss itself. 

But, that leaves us with the problem of what to do. He must work – but who will hire him? He has to live somewhere, but who wants him as a neighbor? And if he is repeatedly and continually ostracized by society, isn't that more likely to drive him to more criminal behavior? What about the conundrum of Broward County, Florida? In 2009, a registered sex offender was begging to be arrested again because there was absolutely nowhere for him to live that was within the confines of his probation. Protecting the public is paramount…but don’t we, as human beings with hearts, have some duty to other living creatures? No matter how reprehensible their behavior has been? When a dog is rabid, we euthanize because we cannot cure what ails him. Problem solved, albeit painfully. Where do we draw the line? Especially since, no matter what your views on capital punishment are, a death sentence has collateral damage that is often overlooked.

This is something I feel uniquely sharply because one of my greatest strengths is also one of my greatest weaknesses.  Empathy.  I kill no creatures if I can at all help it and I often find myself pulled into the emotions of others to the point where I run the risk of drowning in them. When I don’t drown, it is a good thing not only for me but for whoever has leaned on me in a time of need. When I do find myself slipping, it can be heartbreaking, exhausting, and agonizing. It also makes me feel this whole topic rather keenly. Wasps can kill me – as I said in my last blog – and yet I won’t kill one. I’ll capture it and put it outside. If it were to sting me, I would know that it was just engaging in its own nature. As long as we avoid one another, that nature can continue, unabated and unharmful for both parties.

But what about my neighbor? Is the letter from the police department the cup placed over the wasp?  Do we simply  live and let live? Hope he doesn't repeat offend? Find comfort in the litany of restrictions placed on him? Trust the system? Especially since the recidivism rates may not be quite as bad as public opinion thinks they are? Does the percentage even matter? I cannot put any other sort of cup over him and let him outside, so I have to learn to be safe.   I cannot engage in self-torture by dwelling on his crime and I cannot sentence him for one he has not yet committed.   We must, for the moment, co-exist.  Some small voice, however, knows the guilt will sit heavily on me if that next crime should come to pass. Not because of any rational sense of wrong doing but simply because of a zone of proximity that will leave me feeling as if there must have been something I could have done.

In the meantime, I will simply say that I don’t have the answers. I just know I’m more careful and I have added another bullet to the pro column of reasons to move to the country. Which will not solve the larger problem; it will only make it not my problem. Because that is what we do when we don’t have the answers.  If there are too many wasps, we run.

Black, Yellow, and Deadly

Summer is amazing.  It's full of energy and life in a way that no other season can match.  But there's danger, too.  Oddly, enough, though, the danger of summer was captured for me one October afternoon.  It's one of perhaps three times that I've had what I call a near death experience and it is the one I remember most acutely.

As I said, it was October and I was helping mom clean up the kitchen.  It had been warm and there were still mosquitoes out...I had at least one bite on my ankle.  This would become more interesting as the day wore on.  I threw something away and was pushing the garbage down into the bin when it happened.  Just a tiny prick on my thumb between the first and second knuckle.  I gasped a bit and looked down, only to see him sitting there.  He was black and yellow and somewhere looked angry, sullen, groggy.  It was, after all, October.   I said something to my mom and she was surprised - she had apparently killed him and thrown him away earlier.  It would seem he was more resilient than that.  It was a lesson to be learned.

There was not much fear yet.  I had been stung a long, long time ago and had had a terrible reaction, but it was so long ago that there was some level of buffer.  I had become complacent in those long years.

Within a few moments after the sting, the mosquito bite on my ankle began to spread into a full hive that ran nearly to my knee.  It itched.  I felt other hives begin to form and I mentioned them to mom. She sent me up to take a bath in baking soda to relieve the itch.  I may have taken some Benedryl even then, but I don't remember.  I don't really remember any fear at this point, except perhaps the vague stirrings somewhere deep inside.  Somewhere I couldn't place or even identify.  Not yet.

That changed relatively quickly because as I sat in the bath, I could feel my throat begin to close.  I remember licking my lips as the fear became steadily more insistent and my tongue dragged over lips that were beginning to swell.  Eyes, ears, tongue.  I scrambled out of the tub and called down to my mom in a voice edged with the beginnings of panic.  She told me to take my contacts out and get dressed.  Her thought process was far more rapid than mine; she could see my eyes, the swelling and perhaps the fear, too.  Moms know things.  They sense things.  At least mine did.

Later, I learned that there was a different hospital we could have gone to, one that would have been faster and easier.  Mom took me to the one she knew, though, and for that I can't blame her.  She never liked expressway driving so she took me to Thompson.

I don't really remember the car ride...except I remember coughing.  It was getting harder to breathe and I couldn't focus on anything.  My hands were cold, my arms were laced with blotchy hives...the fear clawing at me in ragged breaths drawn between lips turning blue.  I suspect my mother drove faster than she had ever driven up to then or since.

We arrived at the emergency department and mom half dragged, half carried me inside.  She said two words as they came to us, "wasp sting" and they became a blur.  I was in an exam area with a needle in my arm before my mother saw a stitch of paperwork.  I don't remember much - needles, 2800 mg of Benedryl, a blood pressure of 60 / 40, a doctor telling me that when I came in,I was about 10 minutes from a coma.  From there, death.

These days, I carry two Epi-pens with me.  Adrenaline which will not get me out of harm's way, it will only stave it off until I get to a hospital.  I've been stung by a bee since that day, but it only put me on crutches for a week with an angry infection and stretch marks across my ankle.  That hasn't reduced the vigilance; it just focuses it more tightly on what I call the heavy hitters - wasps and yellow jackets.  You see, that's the thing about allergies to stinging insects...I really have no way of knowing if I am more allergic now or if I've grown out of it as I've gotten older.  The only way to know for sure is to get stung again.  So, I am careful.  I remember the fear.  I try hard to not become complacent again.   I have people who help me with that and while I may act exasperated when I am reminded, I get it.

I'm not sure I have any profound words to change the experience into something larger than what it was.  I know I almost died that day and I know my mother paved the way for me to live and while some details are fuzzy, I will never forget the fear and the slow withdrawal of myself from anything around me.  I don't remember parts of it because parts of me were already letting go.  I can still see my blue-tipped fingers in my mind's eye, still see the hives blotting my wrists in awkward patterns.  I remember enough to know I was lucky and in good hands.

We all have these kinds of memories etched into our minds...they remind us how fragile life is and how amazing it is that we draw breath each day and can run through the flowers and walk along the lake on a beautiful summer day.  Some of us just have to remember to bring our Epi-pens along to guard against death in tiny packages of sullen black and yellow...