I want to remind everyone that we do a danger to ourselves by "Monday-morning quarterbacking" this situation: engaging in vicious speculation about how the neighbors failed in our judgment, or about the credibility of Mr. or Miss XYZ who got a three-line quote in a hastily-written AP article.
It's very easy and dangerous to tell ourselves that
- We as a bystander can always tell who is crazy but harmless vs. crazy and a criminal.
- We would know to keep calling police over and over even after they showed up once or told us it had been taken care of.
- We can tell from a distance of a thousand miles and all the preliminary information in a dozen website articles (the accuracy and completeness of which no one is sure yet) just who should be ashamed of what kind of negligence.
- We know that Phillip Garrido (and Joseph Duncan) must be "faking" mental illness and have been faking it consistently for decades.
- We are capable of judging from here that the Garridos' concealment of the girls must mean that they have an internal grasp of right and wrong beyond "other people don't understand me so I'll hide the weird things I'm doing."
- We know from here that a scanned signature on a slip of paper on a crazy guy's website must mean that everything the signers have said is discreditable.
- We know that it's because of illegal immigrants, or [insert favorite scapegoat group here], that everything went wrong.
- etc.
NO! We know hardly anything beyond what we've been told through the filter of mass media at this point. We know that horrendous crimes against innocent women and children were committed, we know who did it, we know who the victims are and some of what happened to them. We know that Contra Costa County authorities screwed up
big time back in 2006; we don't really know why.
We don't know whether witnesses have been accurately quoted or had their entire story told by reporters; misquoting and altered quoting is certainly common.
My point is just that laying down harsh judgments of the neighbors and bystanders, condemning one person or another without the direct experience and with insufficient information is a BAD idea. It's BAD because it allows people to mislead themselves into thinking that they would never have made the same mistakes, it's BAD because it blinds those people us without their realizing it. It makes us less likely to see, understand, or intervene the next time something happens, not more.
Life is rarely black-and-white, human behavior is rarely simple to understand. Hindsight is always 20/20. Why do we persist in gossip that nearly slips into bearing false witness? Let's use the information to investigate and do our best to stop these crimes from happening to others.
If you want an example of what happens when we believe the worst of others without walking in their shoes, go watch that clip of O'Reilly blaming Shawn Hornbeck for not leaving his captor.
I hope that by grace the girls and their family are able to spend most of the rest of their lives in serenity, and that the perpetrators are kept from harming anyone again.
