paisleypiper's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- baby doe and public safety Baby Doe and Public Safety Saturday morning my friend P. and I went to visit a spontaneous community memorial created in honor of a baby whose decapitated head was found in an urban wilderness. No one has been able to learn the baby�s identity for over a year. And with this great feeling of disbelief that babies can be brutalized and go missing without a clue, the community put a memorial to her and holds vigils and prayer services. We did not go necessarily in homage. Not because it is not a horrible event. I have incredibly mixed feelings and conflicting thoughts about baby doe (a synonym for what she is being called by the media and people in State City). Baby Jessica. I remember when Baby Jessica fell down the well in Texas. The nation waited while the rescue workers brought her to safety. Something happens when our media fixates on a story and tries to make it appealing to every segment of the population � sensation it could be called. Not Sensation, but just the second definition of old word that has to do with an excited or violent feeling�a stirring�in a community. These stories come to us and at first, who would not want Baby Jessica to become one of the fortunate well-fall-survivors. But then the greed comes in and we have too much of a good thing. Somehow, while our caring is being raised, products are being marketed to us, and there is too much of an attempt to hold our attention for too many reasons that are both obvious and overlooked. Baby Doe . Baby Doe has been much more intense than Baby Jessica, although I do not know whether the world watched, because there is nothing to watch or even something for which to hope. For a while, the authorities thought that there was a match to the identity, and when this didn�t work out, people were sad. And I wondered about the disappointment because for the people with the missing child, it meant that their baby did not die this brutal, horrible death. It is hard to live with something unresolved and hard to live with a loss that means so much symbolically without grieving for the baby but also for the safety that we need to feel to leave our homes each day. Nightly updates on the news do not sustain sensation, although the news would hope this were true and certainly do their best to cover every angle of the sad mystery. Children were upset. The immediate community was upset. Pictures went up everywhere. And soon, too many people had had their fill of Baby Doe. Moving beyond the sensation into a certain media-sparked cynicism. I no longer watch television, so I miss out on a lot of opportunity to be cynical, but not in this case. I had become cynical from watching the reports (before I quit watching the news). And I could not understand the outpouring of emotion, the spontaneous, citizen-driven memorial that has survived for over a year. My friend and I have talked about this and have wanted to visit it. The memorial is far on the other side of town that just is not crossed often unless you happen to live there. So we went to look at it last Thursday evening, and then went back on Saturday to take pictures. From what we could tell, it began as a few stuffed animals and notes placed on the sign of a park across the street from where Baby Doe was found. Then someone donated a metal carport and more and more items were hung from the carport and placed in little scenarios underneath. The sun and the long winter have taken away the cheap dye in the stuffed animals hanging on the outside of the carport. Their bodies grow limp, a bit like the hope that anything will be resolved. It is quite remarkable the personal items people have left � sports trophies, toys, artwork. I was touched when I looked in the grass and saw a red plastic boat just like one I used to motor around my grandmother�s pond. My friend's reaction seemed to be as surprised as mine but she knew more about the story � she told me the detective in charge of the case is on a personal mission to find resolution. Every night he takes this case home with him � while he lives each day he tosses and turns it around in his mind. She had a few theories, some suspicions, but mostly that same hope. But at the same time, I noticed some of the same distance to the memorial, a familiar analytical approach�. Why this item? What is the connection? And perhaps an appreciation of the surreal atmosphere � of being an outsider to it and observing it, wondering at it from a spontaneous memorial perspective. We talked about how hard it is to understand why or how people do the types of things to babies and children that they do. And perhaps the people so committed to the Baby Doe movement in State City are tired of the brutality to children. Maybe they want to say that it matters to them � but where does one start? By making a contribution to a memorial? By trying to get press coverage? By turning one tragedy into a larger symbol? Or is that just me being analytical. I do not know or understand what this means to the people who are part of this movement. I only know what it has become to me � something that I have been cynical about, something that I see as symbolic of our larger fears of where we, as a collection of many different people living in the same area but not necessarily together, are headed. Some people want to stop and express this sort of thing. I want to take pictures of what a place like this is like when everyone else is going on about their days. The energy there is confusing. I can usually sense a lot of energy in places where people have gathered in vigils and prayer. That I couldn�t may be an indication of how much of an outsider I am. That I felt such confusion over what I was thinking and feeling could also be why when juries are formed, care is taken to find people who have not been watching the media circus. Because I don�t have the guts to write that I have rolled my eyes over this. I don�t have the guts to look at the memorial and roll my eyes. I wonder whether children put those stuffed animals there. Arranged them. I looked into the carport and saw Casper the Friendly ghost looking out, lacking some stuffing. Places with energy. I took my friend to a place that has a lot of energy for me. A park where the chimneys and parts of the foundations remain, in a constant state year after year of being taken in by the encroaching wilderness. But it is beautiful and eerie. And in contrast, it feels completely safe. I wonder about safety and the idea of some neighborhoods being completely unsafe, no matter what. Why were we nervous walking a bit down the path in the old Civil War battleground that was never developed? It wasn�t from some sort of sensation that it was a battleground back in the nineteenth century. More of a fear of the story reported every day that it is a current battleground. Yet for work, I go into neighborhoods that border the memorial site, meet with people, send students there to work for the communities on whatever they need. Hand in hand, groups of students and residents clean up, fix up, talk and share parts of themselves. But for all that is constructed in those exchanges, more is deconstructed in the way that misconceptions and statistics haunt the way people think all over the city. And who wants to be a fool-hardy victim? When I was 16 my father gave up and moved the country after the seventeenth time his house had been burglarized/robbed (I know the fine points between these acts and have since I was eight when once my mother and I came home to a completely empty apartment. Sure a shoe or sock, here or there was left. Some stray papers. Stuff in boxes in closets.) How can I know better and �know better� simultaneously? 10:11 p.m. - 2002-09-08 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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