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| | | Home Invasion | |
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< | My hometown of Cheshire, CT, where I return every Thanksgiving and Christmas, is exactly what I imagine people to picture when they think of “a sleepy town in Connecticut” — a prototypical suburbia, where everyone knows everyone, and nothing out of the ordinary ever happens. That’s all it ever was, until one summer night in July 2007, when it became the site of a home invasion of unimaginable horror that would forever transform my once ordinary town. | >
> | My hometown of Cheshire, CT, where I return every Thanksgiving and Christmas, is exactly what I imagine people to picture when they think of “a sleepy town in Connecticut” — a prototypical suburbia, where euveryone knows everyone, and nothing out of the ordinary ever happens. That’s all it ever was, until one summer night in July 2007, when it became the site of a home invasion of unimaginable horror that would forever transform my once ordinary town. | | | It was surreal. Hayley and Michaela went to my middle school. I rode the bus with them every day. We got on at the same stop, where my mom used to chat with Mrs. Petit before the bus arrived. And then, the news broke. I listened in horror as the details were slowly revealed: how two men had followed Mrs. Petit home from the store, how they beat her husband and tied him in the basement, how they escorted Mrs. Petit to the bank to withdraw $15,000 from her account; how the teller called 911 and the police had set up a perimeter, but that it was too late; how they tied Mrs. Petit and her daughters, 17-year-old Hayley and 11-year-old Michaela, to their beds and molested them, right before strangling Mrs. Petit and dousing them all in gasoline, and setting the house on fire, killing all but Dr. Petit, who not only lost his wife and two daughters, but all of the records of their shared lives together as his home went up in the flames. | | | Works Cited | |
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Why aren't these just links in the text?
| | | http://www.governor.ct.gov/malloy/cwp/view.asp?Q=503122&A=4010
http://abcnews.go.com/US/connecticut-repeals-death-penalty-governor-dannel-malloy-signs/story?id=16212552#.UWSpzBmpa2w
http://thedartmouth.com/2012/01/05/news/Petit | | | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bruce_Ross | |
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I don't understand the idea the essay is meant to convey. You are,
it appears, ambivalent about ending the death penalty because there
are some people you want to kill. The people you want to kill are
closer to being dead than most other people people want to kill in
order to "get closure" for other killings. So, despite your
recognition that "rationally" those other people shouldn't be given
whatever psychological satisfaction they take from the execution of
the murderers at whom they are particularly angry, you'd like to get
yours.
And?
The difficulty is the direct unmediated juxtaposition of your personal
emotion and the issue of constitutional policy. You feel this way,
as citizens feel a variety of strong ways for a variety of personal
and psychically complex reasons. But making interpretative use of
that fact requires more intermediate conceptual material, which you
don't provide. How are we to understand you personal feelings in
relation to the public issues? That you are ambivalent isn't in
itself of much value to the reader or the rest of us.
We are all, I think, for example, —yourself
included—aware of the obsessive quality of the search for
revenge, "closure," "satisfaction of honor," quiet rest of the spirit
of the murdered relative, or whatever name we give to the obsession.
Are you asking us to recognize, criticize, accept, defer to, or cure
the obsession? Are we being told that public policy should be,
should not be, is, or is not made on the basis of obsessional
behaviors by individuals and groups? Are you introspectively
describing an obsession of which you are critical? Why do the
obsessions we acquire in this way deserve to affect public policy,
while the obsessions we acquire in other fashions are our own
business: Why does what you need "for closure" become a public
question, where what you need "for sex" or what you need "for dealing
with fear of old age and death" is not?
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