thisnewday

The following was written in response to a recent news article, and the comments it received, in the online version of the local newspaper. That article was a follow-up to an earlier story which reported that a man, the father of two young children, had barricaded himself in the residence where he lived with his girlfriend and children and threatened to kill himself rather than go back to jail on the warrant which police were attempting to serve.

He eventually ended his own life and the follow-up news article was to report a benefit being held for the children to replace furnishings and other items in their home which had been destroyed by police teargas and stun grenades during the standoff. A typical reader's comment asked why these children should even be helped by the community since their father was a criminal and had brought on these hardships though his own actions.

My old man grew up on a depression-era farm in northwestern Pennsylvania. He used to say that, as hard as the whole family worked, they always had enough to eat but not much more. The kids went to Sunday school and church, were educated in a two-room schoolhouse, and grew up to lead productive lives.

When he was in his early teens, two of the kids that he and his brothers went to school with were struck by a car and left to die along a deserted country road. Everyone in the community knew who did it, a man who owned a local farm and was a reputed drunk. But with forensic science still years in the future, there was not enough evidence to convict him of this horrific crime.

So the community was determined to exact its own form of justice. Because farming was so labor-intensive in those days, cooperation within the community - they called it "trading labor" - was absolutely essential to bringing in the harvest on which these families depended for their survival.

And with feeling running high over this miscarriage of justice, it was agreed that no one would help the alleged perpetrator, thus allowing his harvest to rot in the fields and himself and his family - which included several young children - to starve.

My grandfather, who knew full well the sentiment of the community, took my dad and one of dad's brothers aside and said to them, "I want you to go to the [perpetrator's] farm and help with the harvest. I want you to go there and help every day until the harvest is in. And if you should decide that you don't want to do this, well, don't expect to sit down at my dinner table."

Years later, my dad was attending a program at the suburban high school where my sisters attended. After the program, with the auditorium mostly empty, one of the teachers came over and sat down next to my father. He said to my father, "I know what your father did, all those years ago, and that it couldn't have been easy for you and your brother. But if it weren't for you, we surely would've starved."

My father died three years ago at the age of 94. If he could read this article and the comments that have followed it, he would doubtless say that not much has changed. And that while justice may sometimes seem hard to come by, wisdom and compassion are rarer still...

LPK
LiveJournal
11.26.2012