We’re Your Neighbors

Let’s take a trip to Belgium where a guy for years molested young girls and left them to starve to death in his cellar. His wife and another female knew about the girls that had been taken but said nothing. They killed and tortured numerous children and at least one adult.

A young boy in California wondered into a business. He was starved, chained and in underwear. He’d been kept as a prisoner, sexually assaulted and beaten.

Here in my own state two “people” caged and starved their adopted kids and walked away with a $500 fine and a few short years of probation. WOW! The value of a child’s life is down to a few hundred dollars. One has to wonder what sort of message is being sent to the adopted children caged at the once respected Four Seasons Farm where equine services for the disabled were offered.

In Indiana two young boys were set on fire 4 times before being permanently removed from their home. I’ve talked about them on this blog several times.

My point is this, the people we hear about on the news aren’t that far away. Survivors of this magnitude of trauma are our neighbors, friends and family. We are teachers, doctors and grocery store clerks. This is not happening “just” to people in the news or people across the country.

I will ask you today to remember what you see on the news does not go away just because you turn the TV off. For many the images are burned on their very soul. And I’ll ask you to remember that the people on the news are not half a world away from you. We’re right here, survivors of everything unimaginable. Most of us will never make the news and never even have our abusers face a $500 fine. But we are out here and we struggle day to day to walk with our heads up and be part of a community we feel alienated from.

Survivors aren’t just people we see on the news. We’re your neighbors.

A. August

We’re Your Neighbors-Tuesday, December 09, 2008-1:35AM EST