Your Cleveland Response Checklist

So, it’s a bit late for most of you now, but I’m going to present a list of what priorities should have been following the rescue early this week of three women held captive in a Cleveland home for a decade or more, plus a six-year-old girl conceived by one of the victims. With luck, some of you with compassion problems will take this to heart the next time something like this happens (and it will):

#1: Feel a sense of gnawing horror that anyone would abduct three very young women, hold them captive for any amount of time and do God-knows-what to them while they are terrified, helpless and their families think they are dead.

#2: Feel a sense of joy and wonder amidst the horror that a regular guy saw a woman trying to get attention for help from inside the house, broke in to make the escape of the victims possible and called 911…instead of said regular guy simply shrugging and thinking, “I dunno what’s happening there; I shouldn’t get involved.”

#3: Hold your loved ones close and feel gratitude that they are still with you, and hope that nothing horrible happens to them at the hands of a depraved fuckhead.

#4: Resist the urge to look at interviews of the man who was instrumental in the rescue, consider how colorful his words and forthright attitude are, and then turn him into a form of entertainment for the Internet masses by auto-tuning his interview with reporters, laughing at him for his mannerisms, and/or generally joking about shit when three women have spent a decade in slavery inside a house.

Thank you for your attention.

And if you want me to lighten up and want to accuse me of being judgmental with point #4, I have to look at you and wonder how you can be so inured to pain, suffering and horror that you can even think about jokes over this situation when this news is only about a day old (and some people joked about it within hours).

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>