Reading the newspaper makes me cry
Warning: What follows is not objective reporting of facts. What follows is raw human reaction, and it's not very nice. I apologize if anybody takes offense, but I don't apologize for the way I feel.

This month's candidate for The Worst Story Ever happened four miles from my house Sunday and Monday.

It started Sunday afternoon with the bizarre report that two young children had been found in a retention pond not far from the Interstate by a guy who went out to go fishing Sunday morning. The 2-year-old girl was dead; the 4-year-old boy was clinging to life. No children had been reported missing. Police cast a net all up and down the eastern seaboard trying to figure out who these kids were and how they wound up in the water.

On Monday morning, the authorities had pieced enough together to determine they were looking for a gold-colored Dodge Durango. As they were getting ready to issue an Amber Alert, police two suburbs up the Interstate were called to work a fatal accident ... involving a gold-colored Dodge Durango.

The wreck tying up Interstate traffic for 20 miles Monday morning turned out to be no accident at all. It was caused by the father of the two children who were dumped in the pond, who chose to commit suicide by driving his Durango in front of a truck that was hauling new cars. His other two children, 6 and 9, were in the Durango. They survived, although one child remains in critical condition.

News reports revealed the father to be an upper-middle-class suburban man, distraught over the loss of his job and the impending breakup of his marriage,
whose behavior had become bizarre to the point that his estranged wife sought a restraining order and restricted his access to his children. The kids were with this man for a weekend visit.

"The system failed [the mother] and her children," the mother's attorney told a local television station.

Bullshit. The "system" did everything it could do. The father -- for whatever reason -- became a subhuman monster.

Listen, I understand being dazed and confused from the blows life deals you. I've never lost a job, and my marriage has been pretty sound for nearly a decade and a half, but I do know stuff can turn in an instant. And I've seen worse things happen to nicer people.

The thing that separates men and women from animals is how you take the blows. Our species stands up and takes the blows and thinks its way to a solution. Animals lash back.

I understand being desperate. I understand this man thinking, "Damn, I played basketball at Dartmouth, for Christ's sake. I graduated from Dartmouth. I shouldn't be wondering where my next house payment is coming from." By a lot of contemporary standards, the guy was a failure. It somehow never occurred to him that our society is rife with opportunities for redemption, even for its worst failures.

I understand that despair, although no despair I've ever felt runs as deep as I'm sure this guy's despair ran.

But, dammit. Your despair is your despair. Leave your children out of it. When you have nothing else left of yourself, you still have an obligation to protect your children against everything. That's the root of our existence. It's the one thing you can do when you can't do anything else. To not do so is the highest violation of natural law.

Some people try unsuccessfully for decades to have children. Some people have children with health problems who demand constant attention. It's an insult to all of these people all over the world when somebody treats a child's life as disposable.

I didn't know anybody in this family and I probably never will. But this story cleaves me to the bone, and it would do so even if it happened in Spokane or Minneapolis rather than within a long bike ride from my house.

Although I'm not smart enough to conceive how this is possible, pray that the mother left behind, and the three remaining children, find some way to find peace.

It's not going to do any good for me to write what I think should become of this subhuman monster's soul.