Blog of a Sex Offender
Did any of you hear about this story? This family was found bludgeoned to death with two of the youngest children missing, and then 7 weeks later, the little girl was found with a 42 year old convicted sex offender in a diner. The other little boy was believed to have been murdered.
So apparently the guy kept a blog. Here’s a news article about the responses to his blog shortly after he was arrested.
I randomly found his blog and was reading it from the beginning because he described himself as a convicted sex offender, and his prose was lucid and intelligent. I found it riveting. It was an amazing glimpse into a person’s psychology and his unique experience of life. I didn’t find all the news articles and the “epilogue” of his story until I did a news search to try to figure out what the original crime was that he often alluded to.
It’s amazing. There are posts on his blog that are incredibly noble and powerful, that makes you feel for human beings and worry about our society as a whole. And then as the blog progresses, he rants more and more about the injustice of society, with the posts in the months leading up to the end of the blog (right before the crime was discovered) being discordant with a heavy theme of desperation and a brooding rage.
Our society fails on so many levels, but seeing how everything unfolds, you get a strong sense that there really is no clear cut magic-wand solution. When you read his blog, you feel the desperation of a caged animal who feels ostracized and discriminated and then you see the tragic outcome of his angry retribution towards society directed at strangers. I’m horrified by his actions but I don’t agree with posters who don’t understand how something like his blog was allowed to be published. Suppressing expression isn’t the answer. His blog gives us an amazing chance to see what happens inside a person who has valid points and opinions and feelings, and how a person gets pushed towards making the decisions he made. It doesn’t all make sense, but the pain does. His pain is excruciatingly human.
Was it fair for someone who was desperate for rehabilitation and acceptance to suffer continual adn systematic police harassment? How does a person integrate himself into society if the stigma the powers that be force him to wear prevent him from forming healthy, intimate human relationships? Is the supposed high rate of recidivism high amongst sex offenders in part due to the public quality of their humiliation, limiting their ability to truly rehabilitate and reintegrate? Does our society create a cruel hypocrisy of desiring rehabilitation of our wounded factions, but turning a blind eye to or encouraging a police state that promotes the cruel breaking down of a wounded person’s spirit? Did we fail an innocent family when our neglect of a wounded member of society spawned displaced mindset riddled with desperation and rage?
They say that how a person treats others is a reflection of how one treats himself. Groups such as countries have the same psychology. If the U.S. is officially the “policeman” of the world but more accurately, the “bully,” then does that same cruel exterior/cowardly interior explain our love affair with fear and our mistreatment of our weakest parts? Sometimes I think the U.S. is a country that secretly hates itself because it never makes a wholehearted effort to soothe its internal rifts and integrate all of its pieces. You can cut off your hand because you don’t like the way it looks, but by doing so, it doesn’t cease to exist.
This whole story makes me feel frustrated and sad. It’s not about sympathy for one person or another, or about blaming or judging. It’s about compassion and awareness for the truth of life experience, and how there are a lot of things in this world that aren’t fair and don’t make any sense. I try really hard not to judge anything anymore. No one in this world really has enough facts about anything, unless it’s something that happened to them personally. And even then you can only be sure of one perspective.