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Someone’s talkin’ trash
By Betsy Richter | 12:40 pmSometimes, we are just too politically-correct and oovy groovy for words. Unfortunately, our media outlets only magnify the oovy-grooviness, and make it worse by combining it with high drama in an attempt to pull some emotional heartstrings while selling papers.
But while I have my oovy-groovy moments, I’m still too much of an ex-New Yorker, and I cannot help snorting cynically at headlines like this – She was not disposable – even while I mourn Jessica Williams’ tragic murder.
Her mother is pictured in full-on ranting grief mode during the sentencing hearing for one of Jessica’s killers – a group of street kids who banded together as a family, yet turned on Jessica, a developmentally-disabled 22-year-old who was part of that ‘family’ of kids from all descriptions. They beat her, stabbed her to death, and set her body on fire.
The O’s report, like the Tribune’s, glosses over a closer look at just how Jessica ended up on the street, yet has an entire family grieving her loss in front of the media:
Williams’ family says Jessica had a room at her parents’ home in Gladstone and she was never homeless, even though she sought friendship from people living on the street.
“We knew her, we cared for her,” Rebecca Williams said. “Every day of her life she was wanted.”
Really? Sorry, I don’t buy it. And whether it’s just going for the easy dramatic moment or an attempt to put a nice PC gloss over things now that she’s dead, it’s just one more example where our local media folks flinch away (yes, there’s that word again) from anything that might be controversial.
Instead of statutory rape, we use words like ‘affair.’
We moan about the shooting of a teenage girl on the street instead of wondering just what she was doing out there at 1 am on a Saturday night.
And we get our undies in a bundle when Bill Cosby talks turkey to his own race (Jack’s got the story here, and I added more in the comments.)
Rebecca Williams says “The people who murdered my daughter murdered a child, not a grown woman.”
And I say – where were you when your child was wandering the streets with her murderers for months? Might want to reconsider that use of ‘disposable’ there, hmmm?
Yet one more example of our ‘nobody’s home‘ syndrome at work.
Why aren’t we talking about this tragedy, instead of giving this woman space to air her post-mortem grief?
In his words: “The only way to truly bring justice to the death of Jessica Kate Williams would be to make sure that no young person be forced out onto the streets where she can be killed.”
Topics: Media Rants (& Raves), Opinionated Much?, PDX/Oregon Whim | 3 Comments »
May 25th, 2004 at 2:31 pm
Hey, I read that same thing in the paper this morning and I don’t buy it either! Since she was so like a child why weren’t they protecting her like a child?
Did you read the Commentary section about Bill Cosby? He said this about the blacks, “People cry when their son is standing in an orange jump suit. Where were you when he was 2? where were you when he was 12? Where were you when he was 18? how come you didn’t know that he had a pistol?” For more on that you can read it in the Oregonian or on my blog.
I blame this girls death in large part on those parents. They should have known what that child was into! Such a shame!
May 25th, 2004 at 7:49 pm
I do think to some extent, they did know. But they also thought that they couldn’t get in the way of her fight for independence, it seems.
It’s hard to get upset about mistakes in judgment, made for the right reasons in some cases, that – in retrospect – are huge honking errors in the ‘what was I thinking?’ category. We’ve all made them – and any parent will make more than one as part of their parenting career.
The part I’m having the hardest time with, I think, is the fact that this woman is commanding the spotlight – whether by design or by the fact that the local media’s glomming onto her as the ‘angle.’
If it were me, I’d be too embarrassed and/or guilty to want to talk to anyone publicly about the case, and I don’t think focusing that guilt onto her killers would absolve any of the pain. But that’s my own perspective.
And that’s the piece that sticks in my craw about all of the cases I cite above, including Cosby’s rant – when do we take personal responsibility, or when do we make it the first thing we do, in a way that informs all of the other choices or statements we make in the aftermath?
(Instead of the all-too-frequent casual ‘whoops – my bad’ tossed off as an aside near the end of the fallout…if any responsibility is taken at all, that is)
January 30th, 2007 at 6:43 am
[...] Nick Budnick had this to say after excerpting two sentences from a long blog post I wrote in 2004 about Jessica Kate Williams in today’s Portland Tribune: In the weeks after the murder, a remarkable number of people blamed Becky and Sam Williams for what happened. “Where were you when your child was wandering the streets with her murderers?” asked one particularly vicious blogger. The writer stated the murder was “yet one more example of our ‘nobody’s home’ syndrome at work.” [...]