Thursday, October 20, 2005
Woo, boy, that takes balls
Gaia can often just sit back and let the crazies take care of things.
First up is that rich dude's dead wife who's not at all important to most people yet seems to grab headlines. Some kid killed her. Oh, I mean allegedly killed her.
The Chron gleefully releases the 16-year-old's name and reports that he'll be tried as an adult. No, he's not an adult, but he committed an "adult crime," I guess. Who knows. Who cares. Why even bother having a juvenile justice system if it doesn't apply whenever people don't feel like applying it?
Anyway, moving on to the more traditional "drown-your-kids crazymom" murder:
[Planned Parenthood Spokesmodel Lashaun Harris] told investigators that voices had told her to throw the children into the water, authorities said.
Didn't Andrea Yates complain about voices, too? Well, whatever, I don't remember. What kind of excuse is "voices told me to do it," anyway? When someone tells you to do something, do you do it?
You see, what makes Harris crazy isn't that she hears voices, it's that she actually does what they say, where a normal person would do the exact opposite, just to spite them.
Unfortunately, it's not online, but in the Examiner they had a little box where they talked about the reasons mothers go killing their kids like this. It had some stuff about how mother feel isolated and lonely, unable to turn to anyone, etc. It didn't quite make the connection from "I'm sad," to "I'll throw my kids into the Bay," but I might pick it up again later and provide details.
Update: Okay, I dug up the Examiner. Here we go:
Kathleen Baxter, director of SF's Child Abuse Council:
"Parents feel they have nowhere to turn, they don't have extended family, they might have depression, marital problems, substance-abuse issues, domestic violence. All of these issues play into it."
Marraige therapist Mary Ellen Halloran:
"In some cases, the parent finds himself or herself in such extreme stress and doesn't have any support network, and may be unaware that there's resources available. That leads to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, that spirals down to depression, and then they have no energy to meet the needs of the child."
"We have to put ourself in their place, to imagine what deep pain they must be in to do something like this."
I like my hypothesis: They're crazy. I mean, these folks lost me somewhere between having trouble raising your kids and hearing voices telling you to murder them.
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