Dark Clouds and Rain
Yesterday something was very wrong all over the streets of Toronto. The smiling face of a little girl stared out from the newspaper boxes under headlines that blared "Cecilia Found Dead."
I'm the father of a girl not much younger than Cecilia and my first reaction - a feeling like I'd just been kicked in the gut - comes from the knowledge that this could have been my kid, any of our kids. Like everybody else, I'm sad and I'm angry, and I'm confused, too: I want to know how this could happen to someone so clearly undeserving of such a fate. There is no answer, and I doubt there ever will be.
There's a cloud of mourning over the city. Under this cold, grim sky a million dramas are being played out simultaneously. Police and politicians battle microphones, funding and circumstances. Parents - two of them horribly bereft- weakly struggle with the imaginary, and too often the real demons that would snatch our Angels away. Friends and relatives and well-meaning citizens weep, leave flowers, phone home, wring hands, bake trays of cookies, hug each other a bit tighter. Kids get little lectures on the way off to school, and grown-ups with solemn faces leaf listlessly through the pages of the papers, riding the subway from here to there in a time and a place where things can suddenly and forever go very, very wrong. Everyone everywhere must be a victim now, or at best a scarred survivor.
As the storm weeps and rages, we may catch glimpses of what's going on in brief, bright flashes, snapshot moments caught against the sky. In a flash a child disappeared. In another flash she was found dead. One million flashes in between and after show human faces caught by cameras, bewildered by injustice, sickened by the sickness among us. They are demanding recrimination, resolution, meaning. Some will heal, but all will hurt.
In one flash a criminal is silhouetted against the sky. A monster, by his shadow- but we've seen monsters like this before. In the light of day they shrink, and for all the unspeakable evil of their acts they are always revealed to be nothing more than humans in the end. This may be the darkest cloud of all.
On the stage of our everyday lives this beastly tragedy plays out. A human monster has killed a human angel. The human monster lives, but his life is forfeit- whatever he may become, it will be the mere epilogue to this heinous deed. The human angel is dead, but her picture smiles from the paper this morning. One click. One brief flash. Is this illumination? Or just bright light on more dark clouds and rain?
I'm the father of a girl not much younger than Cecilia and my first reaction - a feeling like I'd just been kicked in the gut - comes from the knowledge that this could have been my kid, any of our kids. Like everybody else, I'm sad and I'm angry, and I'm confused, too: I want to know how this could happen to someone so clearly undeserving of such a fate. There is no answer, and I doubt there ever will be.
There's a cloud of mourning over the city. Under this cold, grim sky a million dramas are being played out simultaneously. Police and politicians battle microphones, funding and circumstances. Parents - two of them horribly bereft- weakly struggle with the imaginary, and too often the real demons that would snatch our Angels away. Friends and relatives and well-meaning citizens weep, leave flowers, phone home, wring hands, bake trays of cookies, hug each other a bit tighter. Kids get little lectures on the way off to school, and grown-ups with solemn faces leaf listlessly through the pages of the papers, riding the subway from here to there in a time and a place where things can suddenly and forever go very, very wrong. Everyone everywhere must be a victim now, or at best a scarred survivor.
As the storm weeps and rages, we may catch glimpses of what's going on in brief, bright flashes, snapshot moments caught against the sky. In a flash a child disappeared. In another flash she was found dead. One million flashes in between and after show human faces caught by cameras, bewildered by injustice, sickened by the sickness among us. They are demanding recrimination, resolution, meaning. Some will heal, but all will hurt.
In one flash a criminal is silhouetted against the sky. A monster, by his shadow- but we've seen monsters like this before. In the light of day they shrink, and for all the unspeakable evil of their acts they are always revealed to be nothing more than humans in the end. This may be the darkest cloud of all.
On the stage of our everyday lives this beastly tragedy plays out. A human monster has killed a human angel. The human monster lives, but his life is forfeit- whatever he may become, it will be the mere epilogue to this heinous deed. The human angel is dead, but her picture smiles from the paper this morning. One click. One brief flash. Is this illumination? Or just bright light on more dark clouds and rain?
Labels: Cecilia Zhang
posted by David Newland at 30.3.04
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