Curious... I remember, with a twinge of pain, the exact moment my son learned there were bad people in the world. He was four years old, playing in the back yard with some neighborhood kids; some were years older than him. One of those kids introduced a make believe game of a killer bad guy coming after all the other kids, with a gun. I was on our backporch and heard what that kid said. I saw the look on my son's face- he was confused. He'd never seen even pretend violence of any kind.
It may sound really stupid and overly sentimental, but it felt then and still does to me that he lost a piece of his innocence that day. It may sound even more stupid to you, but I feel like what I heard yesterday took something similar from me. I'm not young, not naïve, not unaware , even, that there are genuinely "evil" people in the world. I spent over a decade of my life working with Holocaust survivors, researching exactly when and how their families were murdered by the Nazis. I travelled all over Eastern Europe for that work, going to numerous concentration camps. I had nightmares regularly about what I saw and read and spoke about with those survivors.
But yesterday.....yesterday burned into my mind and heart what pure hatred looks and sounds like. A hatred so intense that murdering the person she blames for it doesn't suffice. ....I still can't really find the words to explain how deeply disturbing it is to know that people like her exist. It would be easier to understand if she was indifferent to what harm and pain she causes.
As to the stand. No, she's not going to testify that she hated Travis. She's going to express that hatred in the lies she tells while painting herself as his victim. And she'll be looking in the gallery to see the pain on the faces of those who loved Travis.
