I had a lousy day.  The details are tiresome.  Suffice to say lots of interruptions, not enough work accomplished.  Plus there are people in the world who murder children.

That last part is a shadow over the day.  A stain that kind of sinks into your soul.  Adam Walsh.  Old story, old horror.  I don’t believe in souls, but this stuff hurts something and it isn’t my body or my brain so it must be something, and I don’t have another convenient name for whatever the hell it is that this offends so deeply that it warps the direction of my life, at least for a while.  Until I forget about it.

Except that like most parents I never entirely forget about it.  

There are lots of things kids don’t know about their parents but the craziest thing is the violence their parents hide inside nagging and fretting and disciplining.  Kids don’t have any idea that their parents would die for them.  And kill for them.  I don’t think kids look at their fat tired fathers and their dishwater mothers and understand that here is a person who would not only die, not only kill, but burn down the world for their them.  Crazy, isn’t it?  Disproportionate.  Irrational and probably immoral.  I don’t care.  

When one of us, one of us parent types, sees a story like this, we lose, at least for a time, any pretense of charity, forgiveness, religion, understanding.  Civilization is a pretty thin coat of paint when we see this kind of story.  Because we, the race of parents, want to kill people who do things like this.  We want to kill them.  With the law if that works, but with our own hands if necessary.  Nothing sadistic about it, it’s not really a question of vengeance, it’s just that people like this need to cease to exist.  They need to be erased. On this the race of parents is unanimous.  

Would I take a life to save my kids?  Yes.  Two lives?  Yes.  A hundred?  Ratchet the number up all you like, the answer will always be yes.  Until there’s no one left alive but my kids.  That’s the crazy that kids don’t see in their parents.  Probably a good thing.

John Walsh, Adam’s father, said today that it had been torture not knowing for sure who had murdered his six year-old son.  Reporters used the “closure” word.  John Walsh didn’t say this, but I will:  he’d spent 27 years looking for the monster, needing to kill the monster.  Now he can relax a little.  Turns out the monster died in 1996.

It’s hard sometimes not believing in hell.  Hell is most definitely an appropriate location for those who kill a child.  It’s good that the monster is dead.  But an eternity in hell would be even better.