Where we used to live, we had a neighbor whom we considered a friend. He had a key to our house, we watched each other’s cats during travel, his family attended our family’s birthday parties and vice versa, and he was one of the biggest commenters on this blog.
We moved away from that neighborhood at the very end of 2017 around the time that some rumors were beginning to circulate about our neighbor-friend. By 2019, he had been arrested, and by the end of 2022, he began serving 60 years in a federal facility for horrible things he had done to children over multiple years, facilitated by cryptocurrency and his expertise within that field.
I have since removed all of his comments from this blog, been in contact with the authorities to make sure that my children weren’t among those in the images they collected, and have gone over and over in my mind the ways that he attempted to groom my children and my spouse and I as their parents. I feel anger and betrayal, not just at the things that he did, which are truly horrible, but because when I remember him, the memory is all mixed up with the sometimes annoying but quirky man that we let into our lives. I think about his family and what they must have gone through during all of this (they haven’t been in contact with us since everything came to light). I would like to hate him unequivocally because that would be easier than this jumble of emotions. The entire situation is tragic. He is where he belongs, but while I am so angry at him and so confused and hurt, I can’t feel joy at any piece of it. At best, I feel relief that he’s not hurting children anymore and that the system worked in this case, but too much harm has been done for me to feel triumph.
In 1996, my cousin was murdered by two people who had been her friends. They killed her because they thought it was a kind of justice for her ex-boyfriend’s suicide. The trial was ugly and, in a relatively small community, it pulled even my siblings into the fray (I was in college a few hours away and had gone to high school in a different state, so I was only peripherally connected). One of my cousin’s killers is still in prison and the other has been on parole for a few years. When I think about my cousin I still feel sadness and loss and something I can’t define that’s related to the fact that she and I were the same age and for nearly 30 years there’s been a blank in place of all of the life I’d unconsciously projected for her. But when I think about her killers, I can’t even begin to judge what the appropriate punishment is for their actions, and I can’t say that I feel anything concrete, and certainly not joy that they’ve spent all of their adulthood so far in prison.
This has been my experience of people who have not only spoken horrible things, but who have done horrible things. So when friends (or perhaps “friends,” as they’re people I know just from social media and physical letters) online claim that there are people expressing joy at the murder of Charlie Kirk earlier this week, I feel perplexed. Perhaps there are some who feel joy, but I haven’t encountered any of them. The closest I’ve seen are people, perhaps insensitively but not joyfully, pointing out the irony of some of his stated beliefs. While I found his rhetoric abhorrent and I worried that it promoted division and hatred towards people with different identities, opinions, and ways of seeing the world, I don’t feel anything like joy at his death.
Nor do I feel joy at the arrest of the person suspected of killing him. I feel relief, perhaps, but I also feel for this person’s family and how they must be feeling being in the middle of this maelstrom and being connected so intimately with a suspected murderer. But nothing about this situation brings me joy.
I feel fear that violence seems to be a more and more common way to deal with people with differing opinions, from relatively mundane daily interactions like road rage or online verbal violence, to the many mass shootings that barely make the news anymore, to actions undertaken by our government against civilians. I feel sadness for his family and for those who care about him who are grieving (and then more fear knowing that some who aren’t adept at dealing with grief might then lash out in violence). But I feel nothing even remotely resembling joy.
I don’t know where these claims of gleeful, laughing people come from. I see none of what those online friends are claiming to see. Maybe they’re seeing these things because of the algorithm that curates only the things that make us most angry and most likely to keep clicking. Maybe they’re making it up. Maybe it’s AI. Maybe they’re hearing something secondhand and not doubting it because outrage feels less uncomfortable than grief, confusion, and sadness.
But glee is not what I’m seeing, and this is what is the most scary part to me: That even among people I have felt a kind of kinship with online and in postal correspondence, people with whom I’ve shared the trauma of a global pandemic and the daily joys that brought us through it, we’re not just experiencing different viewpoints; we’re experiencing different realities. In this situation, how can we hope to bridge the gap and build community?
Imperfect Happiness 