You asked a while ago where I was coming from on all of this...
Well, one place I'm coming from is the real stalkings, rapes, murders, etc. that are occurring every day.
It getting to be commonplace where I live to read of former husbands or boyfriends who scoff at restraining orders, harass, stalk, and terrify their ex's for a prolonged period, and end up murdering them. I could cite case after case. The courts seem powerless to do anything about it. These cases involve all-too-real freshly dug graves, children left parentless, and devastated families.
To use a metaphor, There are only so many handicapped parking spaces. When a blonde in a Porsche wearing her running outfit pulls into one of them, it infuriates the hell out of me ... one less handicapped space available for someone in a wheelchair.
The case here was one of annoyance, perhaps even harassment, but confined to juvenile "love-lettters" sent from a great distance to an anonymous alias on a chat line. Wrong? Yes. But to see so many people spend so much time on it, escalating the rhetoric to liken it to a rape or a murder, treating it as if it were a genuine tragedy with genuine pain and suffering ... adds up to me to wildly misplaced priorities.
I think such characterizations demean and trivialize the real dangers and the real tragedies that are occurring around us all the time. Imagine the parents of a real stalking and murder victim reading all this stuff. I think they would be saying, "How dare you compare this to what happened to our daughter? How dare you?" I think it is toward these victims that our hearts should go out. I think it is toward these very real victims that our energies and voices should be directed, to put a stop to it and prevent it from happening.
Every one of the millions of words that have been posted here is one less word spoken on behalf of these real victims.
JC |
