The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, September 18, 2023

Notebook: Going to the courthouse Friday to cover the final day of Brenan Hill’s murder trial I stopped and waited on one of the most ordinary scenes of every morning everywhere: a school bus picking up children. From the effusions of hugs and air kisses and waves and more waves and the reluctance to put shoe to corrugated metal on the bus, leaving so much maternal affection behind (they were almost all mothers), you’d have thought some of the kids were going on a journey longer and more perilous than Vasco Da Gama’s. But in their world, they were: a  day is a year, a mile is a time zone,  school might as well be Tierra del Fuego .(They were all of elementary age, making them by far the wisest among us). Who hasn’t known, who doesn’t remember from that quilted crumple of early childhood memories the morning’s melancholy of departure, that stab of watching one’s mother, arms folded, fading from the school bus window as the vaguely putrid smells of the bus manacle nose to grindstone. We watch these scenes of unreserved love every few corners of every collector street every morning  and idle by, waiting for the stop panels on the flank of the bus to fold back in. Nothing is more urgent than the end of flashing red lights. We don’t give the scenes another thought, or any thought. Daily, copious shows of love in our midst go as unremarked as the comparative length of grass blades from lawn to lawn (though recall what one of the greatest American voices made of those blades). We are more compulsively, even comfortably, distracted by the random mayhems pixelized in our handheld doom slats, tough those moments have the power to remind us of the very shared humanity we think has evaded us since Bowling Alone, even before internets, doom slats and social mierda. And yet. Maybe I was more aware of the scene because of where I was heading, on the fifth day of a lurid trial about a young man who had demolished two women and killed one of them with a gun calibrated to his rage. For a moment as I was watching the children make their Bataan March up the school bus steps, I actually thought: how do these men morph into murderers, if not from childhoods that at one time or another had them taking those very steps, waving back to mothers they had just hugged and kissed? If it isn’t mental illness, it’s the absence of love: the disproportion of men who had no parental love, no hugs in the morning, is one of the great tragedies of our pitiful species: so much of our worst angels could be salved by so little. (Of course not every child who lacks a mother’s hug in the morning becomes a murderer. But rare is the murderer who didn’t have a void rather than parental love in his past.) I thought of Brenan Hill, who had taken the bus in exactly these settings. And then I thought of where I was: Point Pleasant Drive, one of the city’s great misnomers. It is Palm Coast’s murderers’ row. Michael Renaud murdered Margaret Rogers at 58 Point Pleasant Drive in 1992, when Renaud was just 17, still of school bus age. Michael Cummings murdered his wife at 6 Point Pleasant in 2018, a couple of blocks down from the bus stop, when he might have had children of school bus age. Both men are serving life terms. On Dec. 1, Brenan Hill will be sentenced, possibly to something close to a life term. (He faces a minimum mandatory 25 years, up to life, a redundancy of our Deuteronomy-inspired sentencing vengeance: 25 years is a life term.) Of course those Point Pleasant murderers are the exception. Of course the neighborhood, that Vasco Da Gama world, is enormously more filled with huggers and kissers than murderers. But tragedy isn’t lessened by buffering ratios or the smugness of knowing one spared by the other man’s expulsion from decency, especially when we live in a society self-absorbed by its own cocoons of impregnability, of its own bunkers of hugs and kisses, so easily, so frequently turned into indifference or judgments, if not disdain, for those not as lucky to have had that parent at the bus stop. (Just look at how loving parents treat other kids at Little League games: you’d think the diamond was their Masada.) This is where these pastoral morning scenes begin to have an undercurrent of stinginess, to look a lot less communal than they seem. We are not a communal society. We do not really believe in community. Not when we have no heed for the unaccompanied children at bus stops who, some of them, eventually return to haunt us, and on these very streets. A life sentence is only the last expression of indifference. The hugs aren’t the whole story, nor are those pastoral scene as guiltless as they seem: a love of one, without ripples, without concentric circles–diminishing but not indifferent–that does not take in a community’s less lovables, may well be why the loveless in their own homes, if they have a home, have no chance the moment they step out to that bus stop.

—P.T.

 

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What I’ve come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion, everyday acts of compassion. In South Africa they have a phrase called ubuntu. Ubuntu comes out of a philosophy that says, the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me.

–From Chris Abani’s 2008 Ted Talk, above.

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