People suck, you know that? What this guy did to his daughter is reprehensible; it's beyond anything I can think of as 'human' behavior. It's cruel, twisted, sick, wrong, crazy, stupid, wicked, evil.
What's worse - he did it to their grandchildren too. 24 years of up-fuckedness.
I'm sure I'm' not the only one who is outraged, no, SICKENED, by this. Who would DO such a thing? Who could do this to their child? Who could do this for so long? Who would think of doing something like this in the first place?
Who would harm their child like this?
What's sad is that there's every chance that all over this little blue world there are countless other fathers doing this to their daughters. Countless other parents creating a life of horror and misery. Countless numbers of children who grow up believing that other people live like they do, in cramped basements or dirt-floored shacks or in a barn out back with the other livestock.
To say that this is preying on my mind would be to liken a teardrop to an ocean. This woman, giving birth to 7 of her father's children, locked in a basement since she was 11 years old, repeatedly raped, while her Daddy lived upstairs with his wife (who knew nothing about it) and kept a shop in their town, this woman breaks my heart. This woman, who is scarred for life. This woman, kept from her potential by this monster. It could be any one of us. It could have been any one of us, I guess.
Most of us have secrets we keep locked up in a safe quiet place. Most of us have some kind of mystery behind the sadness we sometimes feel. Most of us suffer through our various life pains and come out of them to live a life that has some meaning, but this woman has been robbed of all of that by the hideous beast that felt it was his right to impregnate her over and over, to keep her locked away from the world, to silence her first with drugs and then with fear, to craft an existence for her of rape and pain and shame.
There will be those people who will say "sure, it's an easy thing to be outraged by, but why complain if you're not going to DO something about it?" to which I would answer - you're right. It's easy to be outraged by this. It's easy to gasp in horror at the beastly ways people can treat each other. It's easy to stare at the trainwreck this man has made of these people's lives and cluck our tongues, tsk-tsking our way to the coffee maker. It's easy to talk about this ghastly thing with friends, whispering our shock in gleaming clean hallways while our children attend good schools and our breakfasts digest. But what to DO about it besides gossip and pray?
How to stop it before it happens to even one more person?
I simply don't know. And that, my friends, is what chokes my heart and throat. It's what angers me, makes me clench my teeth in frustration, makes me wonder why people like this are allowed to live.
How to stop it, indeed. Who is the watchdog for "girls who might be locked in a cellar while their Daddy impregnates them"? What organization takes it on themselves to police our society for "men who might be living a double (or triple) life that involves incest with a captive child"? How do we get from suspicion to alert, to make the call we might think is silly about a neighbor who may or may not be doing very very bad things to innocent people? Would that create panic, a police state, a Big Brother society of peeping toms, ready to pounce with indignation at the slightest perceived affront to their own sensibilities?
Or do we care that we create this society? Is it OK to rat out a neighbor, a colleague, a friend that you think might be doing great harm to someone who cannot protect themselves?
I'm beginning to think the answer is yes, and do believe that my Liberal bleeding heart just sprung another leak at that answer.
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This has put me in a mood, y'all. a MOOD, and it's not pretty. This thing, and the polygamy story, has got me going all "women's studies" lately, and I'm angry to boot. This is my vent, my outlet, my brain drain, a place to put the anger so I don't weep in public or move my kids to a mountaintop someplace, shutting out this world and the dark places in it.
The dark places are the suck. Best to focus on the light. Maybe tomorrow.
I sure hope so.
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