No Throwaway People, A Society of Increasing Compassion and Decreasing Violence. A Murder.
My dreams as a child, my understanding of the world, were full of expectations that progress would happen and that more voices would be heard. I felt a particular affinity for redemption stories and for stories that recognized the worth of every individual, no matter their background, whether impoverished or sinful or just different. The Prodigal Son, The Littlest Angel. Each person’s story was important.
It hurts to see cases of brutality and disregard. The onslaught of public messages and stories that are the opposite of compassion feel like a tsunami burying our culture. With newspapers on shoestring budgets or simply gone, I believe that individual stories get lost. A person is murdered, a brief story about the murder may or may not be written, and there’s no chance to tell the story of the victim’s life, unless they were famous, deemed noteworthy, or perhaps rich.
A murder in Houston. A man apparently strangled his wife, and tried to incinerate her body using a 100 lbs of charcoal. They had a child. He has been arrested, confessed. Her native hometown of La Plata Missouri covered the murder with a brief article about the fact of the murder, but nothing about her life. End of story. A story of the murder is written about on local news sites — 300 words, nothing describing the victim except “No immediate neighbors seemed to know the victim very well..”
Who was this victim, Mara Vestal? Age 29. And what else.. an obituary for her mother from three years ago shows that she was one of ten children. She left La Plata Missouri around 2010 — must have been 20 years old. An article from September 2017 in a Missouri paper quotes her briefly — as a “Heartland Native” living in a neighborhood flooded by Hurricane Harvey, quoted describing her neighbors’ plight as “heartbreaking”. A petition for bankruptcy for the couple last May.
And then I find a very interesting reference. She was listed as a speaker — a “sex trafficking survivor” — alongside an FBI agent Theo Williams in April of last year at a conference on “victim issues” in Texas.
In my searches, so many stories of sex trafficking victims appear. I am caught up reading a few. Girls trapped into prostitution, beaten or threatened or drugged. The money going straight to the pockets of those who control them. And legislation in some states trying to make it that girls “younger than 16” won’t be charged with prostitution. I think of the girls aging past that. Is the 19 year old who was trapped at 15 seen as more guilty, less of a victim? Or less worth saving?
What was her life story? Her story. How it ended: She and her murdering husband came home from a strip club together and then he killed her. One wonders. A return to a painful past? Pressure for money?
Ironically, the “heartland” is flooded now, while billionaire dreams of “floating cities” made it into the Washington Post today. The future of compassion seems a bit dark at the moment. This wasn’t where we were supposed to be, by now.
The Houston prosecutor said on TV that 2,000 nonfatal strangulation cases are prosecuted in Houston annually. Prostitution? Sex workers with no other options? Human trafficking victims?
Save them all. Our damned, rich, high tech society ought to be able to save them all.
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