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Some Monsters Are Real
In Full Metal Jacket, the doorgunner, responding to the question of how someone could kill a child, says that it’s easy. “You just don’t lead them as much.” Perhaps black comedy is emblematic of the debacle that was Vietnam, but the line for me has always shown such a callous disregard for the life of children that it’s a movie I will never watch again. Once was more than enough. Killing children should never be the point of any joke.
After I got out of the Army, I became a respiratory therapist. In that role, I got to meet the Grim Reaper on a daily basis. When I heard “Code Blue,” I ran to wherever that loss of cardiopulmonary activity was reported and did my best to wrest back that life from the great beyond. We were successful about 30% of the time. When God calls, no one gets to put Him on hold.
I saw a lot of people who were 50, 60, or 70 years old who spent their last minutes on earth with a plastic tube down their airway and me or one of my colleagues pounding on their chest. We did our best. We always did our best. We didn’t care what race they were. We didn’t care what sex they were. We just did our best every time. It really stunk when we couldn’t resuscitate someone, but those were the way the breaks went in that game, and while we didn’t like it, we accepted that result. A 70-year-old patient had lived his life. We were trying to get him another day, another week, sometimes only another month. But, we accepted the inevitability of the end of human existence as a cost of doing business.
Perhaps I should say that we accepted that most of the time.
I dreaded calls to the Emergency room between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. While you occasionally got your Monday morning heart attack, all too often it was a child that had sudden infant death syndrome, and in spite of everything we did, a child died and a family was devastated. Even the most jaded among us couldn’t laugh that one off.
I remember a child I cared for in the nursery. He was full-term, delivered normally, but he began to crash right after his bath. We intubated, ventilated, and gave medications to stabilize for a transport to the local level-three nursery. But that nursery was full, and so a more distant nursery sent their helicopter.
They refused to take the child with them. He had Potter’s Syndrome. Tied to a lack of amniotic fluid, Potter’s babies have no kidneys, sometimes no adrenal glands, and hypoplastic lungs and heart. There is literally no way to save them. The pediatrician was a big man, a man’s man, and he couldn’t stop himself from crying. We all did. It was a tragedy none of us could have done anything about, but we still felt like we had failed.
Genetic and developmental abnormalities resulting in death were bad. Drowning, electrocution, poisoning, and other accidents were awful too, but they were not the worst.
One bright Friday morning I was called to the ER for an inbound baby of about six months. When he arrived he had very shallow respirations and even at first glance you could tell there was something wrong with his head. The head radiograph showed a pattern I had never seen before except in junk cars with broken safety-glass. The image looked like this image found with DuckDuckGo.
The child went for emergency surgery for his swelling brain. Every possible measure was taken to save his life, but in spite of that, the swelling inside the brain was too great. When the swelling inside the brain causes the pressure to be greater than the blood pressure pumping blood into the brain, the brain suffocates and dies. The body follows. All of us in that ICU knew how the situation would end. There were a lot of red eyes in the unit that day.
Mom was devastated but hopeful, even though the doctors told her not to be. She watched the infant’s heart develop bradycardia (slowed heartbeat) and then stop. She told us she was sure we were messing with the monitor. She refused to accept that her baby was dead. But he was dead, and when that painful reality hit her, the wail she let go with is something no one should have to hear. She collapsed on the floor. She clung to the bed. She did not want to leave the room. And that cry: It was a human soul being ripped from its moorings.
The police arrested the boyfriend. He admitted that the mom asked him to watch the baby while she worked. The boyfriend (it’s always the boyfriend, not the father) got tired of the baby crying and just “squeezed the top of his head till he heard a pop.” He just wanted to sleep. He “didn’t mean to hurt the damned brat.” I guess he had never heard of a pacifier or a bottle. There was no way to know how long the child’s brain was injured before mom got home, noticed something wrong, and raced with him to the ER. She was not jailed. The boyfriend got seven years for manslaughter. Seven years in Illinois meant out in three. That was hard to take.
I saw a number of children abused and neglected in that role, and every one of them hurt. As a lawyer, I doubt I could effectively represent someone who intentionally injured a child. All lives matter, but you’ll be lying if you say you do not place a higher value on some lives. For example, your own, your family’s. Children matter.
That’s why two events from yesterday’s news feed really bother me. The first involved a Wisconsin police officer, on suspension because the mob came for his job, who had a brigade of BLLM (Black Liberal Lives Matter) protesters show up at his home, assault him when he tried to reason with them, and then fire a shotgun blast into the house where his children stayed. I can understand being angry at someone, I can even understand the psychoses that leads someone to shoot at a grown man. I can’t understand, nor would I be able to forgive, someone that shot at a child. And, if black lives matter, does wearing a blue uniform mean that a person is no longer black? And if that’s so, what about black children of a police officer? Do they lose their “blackness” by virtue of being the offspring of a police officer? I assume the “protesters” did not know he had children in the house. Who would knowingly shoot at a child?
A monster would. That’s what I found when I went to this website. Read the story, and watch the report. A neighbor, upset because a child was riding a bike on his lawn, runs up to him, and simply executes him with a shot to the head. What kind of monster does that? What kind of person feels so passionately about their grass that they would shoot a five-year-old child in the head?
I’m not an angel. I’ve done some mean things in my life. I’ve certainly had my fill of children screaming their lungs out at 30,000 feet. I dread getting on an airplane with children for that reason. But I understand that it’s pain they’re feeling and I am not mad at them, I’m mad at the adult that’s making them experience that pain without a plan for dealing with it. I don’t understand how anyone could knowingly and intentionally harm a child.
Children screw up. They make mistakes. They learn from them. That this little boy won’t be able to learn from his, and that the monster who allegedly killed him will likely plead out to something that will get him something less than the death penalty are equally upsetting. The shooting was witnessed. There is no doubt about guilt (allegedly). The only real defense is mental disease or defect, and the taxpayers in that county will pay a public defender to hire a psychiatrist (and the DA will do the same) and at some point, there will be accountability if he doesn’t plead guilty sooner or get sent to the hospital for the criminally insane.
It is long past time to make the penalties for assault with intent to kill, murder, and other crimes committed against children carry the same penalty, and the same sentences, as crimes against adults.
Because what we have now is not protecting our children.
Published in Law
Read Trotsky’s argument in favour of killing the children of Bolshevism’s enemies.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/morals/morals.htm
He got one thing right: “The theory of eternal morals can in nowise survive without god.”
This is very hard to read.
@Housebroken it was hard to live too. But so much of this remains under wraps. I am dedicated to bringing light where there is darkness, even if that means making people see some of the evil out there in the world. I know it’s unpleasant. But if you have children, hug them closely tonight. Watch over them, protect them, and teach them. That’s the real message here.
There’s a big difference between shooting into a house and making a joke about shooting from a helicopter. Jokes are often funny because they shock and are inappropriate, and that can relieve the tension of the deadly business people are sometimes forced into. In other words, there’s a high horse you’re on.
I defend people are accused of abusing and neglecting children. Everyone deserves a defense, and you have to keep prosecutors honest or they will abuse their power in a heart beat; not because they are bad people but because people are bad by nature and it’s a natural consequence of unbridled power.
Harm toward children is one of the few things I simply can’t read about. It disturbs me to the core, and I just don’t want to hear it even though I know it’s important, especially as a father of young kids. The callousness of some peoples attitudes toward joking about kids is infuriating to me. Thanks for shining the spotlight.
It is also true that due to the insane vax schedule where vaccines like the hep b vaccine are injected into tiny babies, the same swollen brain, and petrichhae symptoms can manifest due to a fatal vaccine injury.
So if the parents are pillars of the community, and understand what killed their infant, doctors might assist them in getting aboard the VAERS system so that a half a dozen years down the line, they will be financially compensated for the loss of the child.
If the parents are further down the food chain, it is not uncommon for one or both of the parents to be accused of inflicting “shaken baby syndrome” and indicted for infanticide. Many DA’s and Assistant DA’s are clueless that a swollen brain and petrichhae can occur due to vaccination. In some cases, local vaccine awareness groups manage to get lawyers for such parents and then they have a shot of getting out of prison at some point.
Here is what one judge stated at a release hearing: “People are told the worst thing that can happen is to bury their child during their lifetime. But that is not true. The worst thing is to have a child die through the vaccine process gone wrong, and be accused of the child’s murder and then convicted.”
I have heard plenty of dark humor. People in my office joke about extremely dangerous chemicals and microbes. People share plenty of humor with me that involves horrible atrocities. This includes jokes about dead children, especially when it is cranked up to maximum degrees of ridiculous.
But actual dead kids are something else. I’ve heard people say that parents in the past were more blase about losing children, and I do not buy it for a minute. You can see gravestones for young children in Puritan cemeteries and stories of parental grief going back ages. Animals that bond with the children seem to mourn their loss.
I love reading novels, especially suspense and action novels. I finish even badly written books, sometimes by skimming. But if I can detect that there is an extended part of the plot or a key plot turn that involves abuse of children or defenseless women, or rape, I won’t buy the book. If it comes as a surprise, I’m gone. Maybe I’ll jump to the end in hopes that everybody is relatively okay, but not always. Life is hard, and I want the good guys to win.
Mis,
Remember this wasn’t Stalin. This was the “nice” one. You can see so clearly from this the diabolical sickness at the very center of Marxism. It is written in stone. They believe that the end justifies the means to the very end. The very genocidal horrific end.
Regards,
Jim
From the writers angle this is sometimes difficult. I write military fiction. There is a lot of violence in war, often against women and children, but I’ve found there are ways to convey that (sometimes character development necessitates explaining tragic history) without actually writing it. In fact I can’t write it, it’s too hard.
In my last book I had a situation that called for a scene of domestic violence. I wrote it in my head, then agonized with typing it up for several days. In the end I tamed it down considerably and managed to reach the same place. It’s hard but sometimes realism versus tact is a high ridge to negotiate.
Yes, I know that events like that are necessary in some books. I may have been a bit inaccurate; what I don’t want to read is a book that wallows in the mistreatment part of the plot. Sort of violence porn, if you will.
When in the Army, the first autopsy I had to assist was on a two-year-old who died of meningitis. I think a combat death would have been an easier opening. The pathologist dispassionately narrated the path of the infection, almost like the disease knew what it was doing. Besides the lethal neurological damage, there was necrosis on the adrenals as if to prevent any boost of energy and petechiae on organ surfaces like small base camps. Sewing up the emptied chest was something I never got over–the doc stepped in to finish that because he could see I was losing it.
We had a large bacterial meningitis outbreak at the base, even a mention in Newsweek. The base hospital had two pediatricians and several internists. They battled. We lost just one life. Everyone else infected (including kids) pulled through. We cultured and tested everything and everybody it seemed and used up every petri dish and swab flown in. The public health guys traced the source to a Vietnamese woman who did baby-sitting. Like a lot of the Vietnamese nationals we dealt with medically on the base, she had immunities and unknowingly carried bugs (and parasites) indicative of a biologically much tougher place to live. Not her fault. She was devastated.
The descriptions in the post about the collective emotions when a kid is lost had a lot of resonance for me. In the case I described, it was if everybody with some kind of a caduceus insignia felt like we failed. It was a gut punch.
I read “Silence of the Lambs” when it first came out in print. I then got tickets the first week it was out as a movie. So many of my gf’s were all: “It is so violent.” But the violence of the murders that happened was all off screen in that the bodies were discovered in whatever abject state of ruin they were in. These days even TV shows will show the actual torturous misdeeds being done to a crime victim as they are killed. But “Silence of the Lambs” avoided that. It certainly did not lose its status as a compelling film due to the way the violence was handled.
Can you PM me a list of your books. I would love to read them.
The Silence of the Lambs was great at that, until the third act when we see the true Lecter emerge. That’s a pretty gruesome few minutes, but it’s still an amazing movie.
I agree completely. But you have to recognize your inherent bias and be faithful to your role in the system. Because of that bias, I could not do it. If ordered to by a court, I would do my best. But I think the ethical thing for me to do is not to do it. That doesn’t mean I believe every child abuser is guilty of anything. I believe in our system. I believe in juries. Given the facts, and good argument, they usually get things right.
Thank you for doing what you do and defending the oppressed. It is a glamourless thankless job. People like you make me proud to be a lawyer.
Vince, I think for people who are inherently good they find that writing that kind of thing makes them feel dirty. It’s necessary for plot exposition, I know, but it still feels bad and ugly. One person who does it well is Dean Koontz. One reason I love his books is that they are always thematically about the triumph of the human spirit.
I understand my friend. Thank you for sharing that experience however. It helps, sometimes, to know we are not alone.
I was in the hospital with my 12 hour old granddaughter. Her parents and I took turns sitting by her and holding her little hand. Just above my head were the monitors with wires inserted into the baby. There were about 5 doctors and nurses working on her. The monitors went off, and I lifted my hand and pounded them to make them start up again, then looked back at the baby and all the Doctors and nurses had stepped back. Everyone of them had tears pouring down their faces. I then realized that Chelsea had died and let out a cry, 2 nurses immediately came to hold me.
Then I went and told my daughter and her husband. Can’t tell you which was worse.
Later we learned she had a Hypoplastic left heart.
I can only imagine how horrific that was for all involved.
Kay, I am so sorry.
I try not to think about it much, but like Anthony, from the life flight from Carmel to San Francisco, everyone did their best. All of them at top speed. This was in 1986 and they didn’t seem to have some of the diagnostic machines as they do today. They couldn’t tell us what was wrong with her until after the autopsy.