I've been struggling with this story all day long. It hits the absolute rock bottom of human nature... and presses deeper.
It sets into perspective why civilized, educated persons of conscience can actively dispute whether or not torturing prisoners is okay.
Because we as a society are too used to stories like the one I am about to share with you below the break.
Fair warning - You stand a high chance of crying, shouting, shedding tears, losing sleep, losing lunch, or some or all of the above.
So here goes...
We are utterly incompetent as a society to police ourselves, never mind our government, on matters of truth, evidence, law, order, due process, corruption and justice.
Our every effort to establish life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has failed.
The bright light of the preamble, with all its talk of domestic tranquility and promotion of the general welfare...
domestic...
tranquility...
welfare...
I can barely hold back the tears. Our failure is not just absolute - it is eternal.
Until we can stop... this
Police say Angel Vidal Mendoza appeared to be under the influence of PCP when he attacked the 4-year old boy April 28.
...
A neighbor found 4-year-old Angelo Mendoza Jr. naked, unconscious and covered in blood on the floor of his home.
Officers later discovered that one of the boy's eyes was missing and the other eye was horribly damaged.
Investigators said the child told them, "My daddy ate my eyes."
I have a four year old. He is a pest. He whines. He is loud. He is moody. He is also, save for the color hair, the twin of this eyeless boy.
He is also a joy, a source of laughter and boundless energy and love, he is a special gift to me. At a time when the light of my own heart was failing he awakened from infancy to personhood and there is a special tie from me to him and through him to my wife and older son, who are their own special pair within our house.
For at a time when I felt the urge to despair and turn the light of life to dark..my little boy came alive as a person and gave me a purpose to hang on.
Yes, he is a brat. Sometimes I just scream his name in frustration...but he is of my heart and mind, my soul and my spirit, my flesh and my blood.
He is my son. What he sees I share. What I see, I try to share. Whether he smiles or sighs, shouts or cries, there is a brilliance in his dark near-black irises that shines, or sparkles, or pours, or burns depending on his mood.
My problem is I am a visual thinker. And I can feel things intensely, memories of emotions past, syntheses of feelings that don't exist. While it's great for writing.. it is a bane in situations such as these.
Because, from a few horrible details, I can assemble a tale in my mind, a close witnessing of an event that I dare not imagine.. and yet cannot stop seeing.
Because I can see it happening. I cannot imagine motive, but ... yet I can. I can see the father, wired and agitated, the boy being.. four years old. Perhaps he is crying, or something. The father shouts. THe boy starts to tear up. More shouts. Threats about drying up the eyes or else. Now real fear; this father has hurt him before. Then ...
...my daddy ate my eyes.
It does not help that this account of a neighbor is available now
Tonya Hammond lives next to the Mendoza family in one of the Ohio Drive apartments. She said she heard yelling coming from the family's unit when the alleged abuse was happening on April 28. A few minutes later, she and another child decided to check on the boy, who they called Angel.
"Angel was on the floor, unconscious and he was naked," Hammond said. "You could tell he was breathing, because his stomach was going up and down."
Hammond called 911 and followed directions until police, fire crews and an ambulance got there. She said she didn't know exactly what the child's injuries were, because she didn't want to get too close and cause additional harm.
..
Hammond has put up a cross in the yard in honor of Angel. She said the perky little boy had been eating cookies in her apartment the day before the attack.
There were people who cared. People who loved the boy.
Just not, apparently, his own parents. The links from these two stories and more paint the pictures; the parents were PCP addicts. Both of them. They were child abusers. Both of them.
There are many issues in play about child welfare. I will let those tales unfold, as investigations in where the system failed play out.
But rest assured - we are, in this and in many, many other instances, a society that fails to keep torture from happening en masse, against our most vulnerable Americans, on a daily basis.
Because it's tacitly understood that parental rights trump all other considerations in all but the most egregious of cases.
And as well meaning and lavishly funded as child services programs might be - they'd still miss a lot of abuse, they'd still be swamped with cases, they'd still face intense resistance from... interfering in famiies and communities.
And guess what? Child services programs just aren't lavishly funded like that, and the staffers on hand are not invariably angels. Some just have a job. Some, coping with a hapless task... start shutting down.
Shut down? You mean, like law enforcement officers and soldiers in war zones do, when facing a succession of seemingly neverending atrocities?
Yep, that's what I mean.
they have to stop dreaming of this
and this
and this
this too
And you know what happened today? To me?
I wanted to shut down. Badly. To an extent I had to. I had to work. I had to function. Also, I had to see my own kids eventually today. I did.. but it was hard to sit at table and hear them laugh and pout about not having extra burgers. It was hard how my little son kept peeking around the flowers in the center of the kitchen table, smiling and trying to catch my eyes.. .with his eyes. Happy, shining yet haunting still-there eyes.
My four year-old still has his eyes.
Out there is one that does not.
I even looked up information on eye transplants. I found out I had a very wrong idea on what they were and what was possible. Apparently eye donations do not mean you can swap out one set of eyes for another. It's corneal transplants that happen...which are good for accidents but not for replacing missing or chewed up eyeballs.
I found myself wishing we had eight more years of stem cell research under our belts. But we know why that's not so.
We are a society that says torturing children is bad. And we cannot effectively stop it. Worse, we are half-assed about even trying.
This goes for abuse of women as well, even more so. After all, a woman can just up and drive away right?
depends on if the man of the house says it's ok, I guess
LAKELAND, FL -- Police say a central Florida man shot and killed his wife and two of his sons -- one of them an infant -- before killing himself.
Another son, a 13-year-old, was pursued through the garage by his father, evaded several gunshots, and made it safely to a neighbor's house, Polk County Sheriff's Department spokesman Scott Wilder said in a statement.
Investigators believe Troy Ryan Bellar, 34, and his wife, Wendy Bellar, 31, were in a domestic dispute about 9:30 p.m. at their home in Lakeland, located between Tampa and Orlando.
A little boy in Bakersfield has been left seeing only one color from now on - darker than dark. He was maimed and blinded and left for dead.
And the worst, guiltiest feeling I have?
I could not frame it in words for most of the day, then I could, then I was so appalled with myself.. but it is the truth within it all.
I asked myself - Why could this monster at least have the decency to finish the kid off?
And I realized - I am not civilized anymore, am I?
Are enough of us?
Are any of us?
So here we are, in cyberspace, sometimes in the halls of power or at least the lobbies, debating the propriety of torturing detainees that we don't even accord the label of prisoners.
As if.
We don't even mind sending three million-plus men and women to years of off-the-record violence and sexual abuse behind bars.
We torture regularly, and we are cool that we do so.
We always have been.
How could we be otherwise?
We look the other way every chance we can, when women are gunned down by their lovers, and their children tossed over barricades and down stairs and left for dead.
We do this, and we have for centuries. Reaching farther back in time, we always have done this.
It's part of our nature as humans. Our savage nature.
And that is the heart of the matter. We are beasts, not entirely, but the Beast is there, always.
And only the light, brightly lit and bravely brandished, beats the savage demon in each of our breasts back.
Only it's a light that a little boy in Bakersfield will never see again.
And it's our fault.
It's always been our fault.
And every fine word we ever said or swore about what our society stands for is a laughable lie, until we can make the Preamble true for the little ones. All of them. Every word for every child. Or not one word means a thing.
And that is why we cannot resolve to look to our better angels and treat even our enemies well.
Because we do not treat out children well.
Not just the ones under our rooftops.
But all of them.
And until this matter is straightened out in every particular, we have failed.
And we will remain failures.
Not just as Americans but as human beings -- rather, what we aspire for human beings to be.
And yet...
A dear friend admonished me just now - find the Hope, and share it with us.
Ok...I will try.
Start by crying. Crying freely and together. That this happened. That this happened and it is just one pale arms sticking free of a terrible landfill full of mutilated children, murdered women and massacred men - all those that our fine words and promises failed.
Mourn, that we have failed them. Fully.
Then.. take a deep breath, look at each other fully in the eye.
Yes, you all see it. You all see each other's shame, and look away again.
Then, move closer, to someone, to several, to anyone.
Take hold of your friends, your children, your partners, your husbands, your wives, your lovers, yourself for the moment if needs must.
And cry some more.
You are loved. You are not shut down. You can feel, and see truth, and know right from wrong.
You can make yourself whole, by helping make others whole...by trying.
By loving and helping and hoping back.
And right now, there are two boys who should be asleep but for some reason aren't quite there.
And right now I have a wife that I see like a train going on twin tracks passing twice each day during the week.
I love them. I love her. I love this life I too often let clickety-clack minute by minute away without my participation.
So I am going to go to them...I am going to finish these tears, and see what hope and love comes of it.
Because I can still see the light.
And that compels a dreadful responsibility on me - on you - on all of us - to do our best to make sure than no child sees darker than dark ever again.