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My first day on the job.
Mar. 1st, 2007 08:01 pmToday I drove a woman home from the hospital. She told me the story of how eleven years ago, she interrupted two boys, fifteen and sixteen, while they were robbing her friend's barn. They pulled a gun on her and ordered her back into the house and made her lie on the floor. They shot her in the back of her head with a twenty-two caliber rifle with hollow-point bullets and left her for dead.
Hollow-points break off into many fragments when they fire, sending tiny sprays of shrapnel through their target. In this case, it was this woman's brain and five pieces of the bullet are still lodged in her skull. She talks haltingly, as if she has to decide which words to say individually, slowly and carefully. She was in a coma for forty-something days and many more months under the care of various brain specialists and rehabilitation experts.
If this wasn't an odd enough event, she went on to tell me how she's forgiven the boys who were sentenced to eighty years in prison. They are eligible for parole when they are thirty-two, but probably won't get out till they're in their fifties. She meets with them yearly and they regularly exchange letters. She talks about how much they needed it, how they thought that because of what they'd done that everyone hated them, so she decided that she would be the one to love them.
She told me that she "talks, talks, talks" to support groups and students about her ordeal, about how a life can so easily be destroyed, meaning equally her life and the life of the boys who shot her. She hinted between words, or maybe I was hearing an echo of my own thoughts about how violence is rarely for it's own sake, but it's a symptom of being afraid.
Movies lead us to believe that we can be evil and violent by nature, that some of us just are, but I think if you looked at the context you would find a very frightened person irrationally lashing out. Self-preservation and fear of the unknown are powerful forces within us, perhaps some of the strongest and arguably the hardest to resist.
I'm suddenly reminded of American Beauty, a movie full of the effects of fear and oddly enough - gun violence - and young Ricky Fitts, who tells us that a bag dancing in the wind told him that "there was this entire life behind things, and... this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever."
I think we all need a moment like that. Imagine if everyone had a moment like that.
Hollow-points break off into many fragments when they fire, sending tiny sprays of shrapnel through their target. In this case, it was this woman's brain and five pieces of the bullet are still lodged in her skull. She talks haltingly, as if she has to decide which words to say individually, slowly and carefully. She was in a coma for forty-something days and many more months under the care of various brain specialists and rehabilitation experts.
If this wasn't an odd enough event, she went on to tell me how she's forgiven the boys who were sentenced to eighty years in prison. They are eligible for parole when they are thirty-two, but probably won't get out till they're in their fifties. She meets with them yearly and they regularly exchange letters. She talks about how much they needed it, how they thought that because of what they'd done that everyone hated them, so she decided that she would be the one to love them.
She told me that she "talks, talks, talks" to support groups and students about her ordeal, about how a life can so easily be destroyed, meaning equally her life and the life of the boys who shot her. She hinted between words, or maybe I was hearing an echo of my own thoughts about how violence is rarely for it's own sake, but it's a symptom of being afraid.
Movies lead us to believe that we can be evil and violent by nature, that some of us just are, but I think if you looked at the context you would find a very frightened person irrationally lashing out. Self-preservation and fear of the unknown are powerful forces within us, perhaps some of the strongest and arguably the hardest to resist.
I'm suddenly reminded of American Beauty, a movie full of the effects of fear and oddly enough - gun violence - and young Ricky Fitts, who tells us that a bag dancing in the wind told him that "there was this entire life behind things, and... this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever."
I think we all need a moment like that. Imagine if everyone had a moment like that.
