Originally posted on February 3, 2009 - Tuesday
Current mood: sympathetic
Category: Life
I
was reading in CNN today about four young men (I use that term loosely)
that were targeting & attacking black folks after Obama’s win. They ranged
in age from 18 to 21. They’d beat one man with a metal pipe and a collapsible
police baton. The first whack was to the man’s head, which was obviously meant
to kill him. The
poor guy escaped the ignorant thugs by hiding in a neighbor’s back yard until
they passed him by. He survived, but ended up with several staples in his head
and numerous injuries to his legs. There were more attacks but the last attack
these geniuses perpetrated was against a man with a hoodie on, walking down the
street while they were driving by him in their car. Their plan was beat him but
at the last minute, the driver purposely swerved into the walking man,
shattering their windshield and leaving the man with multiple head injuries. Because
of the hoodie, they’d mistaken the man for black but he was actually
white.
I
bet the hoodie stock will go down after that.
The
thing I found most ironic about the whole thing, is that the last names of the
perpetrators are Nicoletti, Contreras, Carranza and
Garaventa. I don’t want to be stereotypical here but those hardly sound
like the sir names of Native Americans (the only people that should
have a true claim to this land). Do these punks with non-Native American
last names have a monopoly on this country? Is this country somehow just
theirs and no one else’s? Stupid, blind and bigoted ignorance, a thing of
the past? Not so much. I wanted to feel anger towards them but I mostly, I feel
more pity for them than anything else. Tenderness, clearly not a part of
their formative years. But tenderness will be an all too familiar
sensation to them when they drop that soap in the shower, in prison.
I’d
also read a story about a Texas woman that had killed her toddler daughter by
beating her, throwing her across the room and finally, holding her head under
water. Then, she disposed of the young girl’s body in a blue plastic container
on an uninhabited island in Galveston Bay. What the heck would make someone spew
so much venom on a helpless child, let alone their own flesh and blood?! This
woman (I use that term loosely) carried this child in her body for 9
months. She endured labor pains for this child. She tenderly held that
baby in her arms in the hospital as she beamed down at her tiny face. How
could she discard her own flesh and blood like useless garbage?
There are so many scary Andrea Yates type mothers out there;
mentally unstable, dangerously negligent or both. No matter how close to me
these cases are geographically, those stories always seem so ‘far away’ to me.
But when thinking back, maybe not. I
remember this really pretty, super nice chick sis & I knew back in college.
We’ll call her "Selena". She worked at a grocery store close to sis & I’s
campus apartment. I’m not sure why, but she really liked us a lot and wanted to
engage us in conversation anytime we’d see her. We’d even see her at this club
we used to frequent on the weekends. Sadly, we’d also seen her a
few times at the club stumbling, crying & pissy drunk. Not
a pretty sight for such a pretty girl, or any girl for that matter. She’d be on
the club's bathroom floor crying and carrying on about some dude in the club
she’d broken up with (who wasn’t remotely concerned about her incidentally).
We (sis & I) would try to console her and get her to her feet but
it was just a little too much drama for us to deal with. So after a while, we
just tried to avoid her as politely as possible. After
a few embarrassing displays from her at the club, sis & I tried to make the
sober moments with her working at the grocery store shorter and shorter. I’d
started to just ignore her at the club altogether. It
was really weird how this beautiful young woman could seem so tender,
sweet and 'together' in the daytime and so atrociously pathetic at night. She
was a mess to be sure but I guess you never truly know what a person’s demons
are, right? 👿 Around
that time, there was big news in our city about a baby that had been callously
abandoned next to a dumpster, wrapped in plastic garbage bags. It was a cold
December night too, so it was a miracle that the baby girl survived the bitter
cold. The police named her Baby Noel and there were numerous pleas for
information in finding her mother. No one ever came forward. The little baby
girl was adorable and quickly adopted but the mystery of who her birth mother
was, slowly faded away in importance. Actually, the law/policy where a mother
could drop a baby off at a hospital, police station or fire station with no
questions asked, was in direct response to that case. The authorities didn’t
want to risk something like that happening to another innocent child and
petrified mother. A
few years later, it happened again despite the “no questions asked”
policy, in almost the exact same way. Another baby girl wrapped in plastic trash
bags abandoned by a dumpster. This time, the police were extremely diligent in
pulling out all the investigative stops. They eventually tracked the birth
mother down by the plastic bags she used. Neither father knew about the
pregnancy in either case until they uncovered who the mother was. After that,
several men came forward claiming they could be the father and one was proven to
in fact be the second baby’s father. The mother had given birth in the bathroom
of her apartment and abandoned the baby girl by a dumpster, just like the other
baby years earlier. The second baby was given to her birth father and after DNA
testing, they discovered that the second girl was related to Baby Noel, so they
had the same birth mother. Turns out, the mother was our tender, sweet, grocery
store employed friend (Selena) that had a penchant for getting drunk and mooning
over men that didn’t want her.
The
father of the second child wasn’t even the guy she was getting drunk over at the
club. We
backtracked and discovered that we’d talked to her many times when she was
pregnant but she was a thin girl and you never would’ve known by looking at her.
Then again, I'm sure her baby’s health was hardly a priority. The fathers didn’t
know either and they would have had a much more intimate view of her-I would
think. Surprisingly, our sweet friend’s father was some kind of royalty (or
equivalent) in some other country, so I guess she was trying to make sure news
of her pregnancies never got back to him.
I
suppose she was trying to live independent of her family by working at the
grocery store and keeping her real Texas life a secret.
I
guess you just can't ever truly know what some people are going through,
right? 😈 After reading the many sad and true stories today, I'd been reminded of
her and how a little TLC can sometimes repair great damage. Though I’d forgotten about that story on a conscious level, I realized that
Selena’s story (and many more) where always here with me. Truthfully, I knew she
liked me (and sis) a whole lot. I’d always wished I’d tried harder to help her
and be her friend. I’d carried the guilty feeling of realizing what a tortured
soul she must have been then and it’s greatly colored the way I treat people
now. Now I know she was grown enough to know that intercourse can lead to
infants and she’d been super blessed with the first baby. But I’d wished I’d
done a little more in her case, after all I knew her. Frankly, I don’t want to
be Captain-Save-A-Hoe to everyone because you can’t be everything
to everyone, sometimes a person needs to dig them self out of their own
mess. But
I DO want to take care not to neglect needy people when I have a
little energy to spare. Sometimes a little understanding and patience can help a
person more than you’d ever realize.
A
little tenderness; free to you but it could be worth so much to someone
else. Self-preservation is important, but so is a little brotherly &
sisterly love. I
sure hope I remember that tomorrow morning when I get the sudden urge to pick up
my computer monitor and break it over the head of my co-worker slurping their
coffee too loudly.
One
day at a time, right?
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