I recently ran across a You Tube compilation of talks given by an author, Brian Doyle. I will probably do a separate entry on him, no, I WILL do a separate entry on him, because his writing speaks to me. It actually makes me laugh, and cry--he is so skilled. las I will never be able to tell him because he died of a brain tumor at the age of 60 in 2017. He was two years younger than I am. He said something in one of those talks, not likely original to him, but which in light of my inability to get Iryna Zarutska and now Logan Federico, two young women executed by lifetime criminals, that we know, but we avoid facing in our daily lives.
You are only here a minute. And the stories of Iryna and Logan, and even Brian, many get less than that minute.
The truth is, I can't get Iryna, in particular, out of my head. I only recently found out about Logan, via her heartbroken father who is on an existential crusade, who was visiting the home of a friend. In the middle of the night an intruder with multiple priors broke into her lodging, dragged out of her bed naked and shot her to death. She was 22. And, unlike with Iryna, perhaps mercifully, we don't have video of her execution.
I have never watched the full video, but I have stared at the frozen frame of her looking up at her attacker in shy astonished terror knowing she was about to be dead. And there is another freeze frame, with the phone she had been mindlessly scrolling thinking her new life was an improvement on the one in Ukraine where she had escaped a war still in her hand. She is crying while she bleeds out. And three or four other passengers who were there when she was stabbed ruthlessly had just walked away. People have made many excuses for them, but the killer had already left, and perhaps the least they could have done is try to staunch the life blood ebbing from the 23 year old's body. Or perhaps comfort her if they could do nothing else.
I thought about Iryna, in particular, today when I was at the Farmer's Market in Los Angeles. It wasn't super crowded. I have been there a million times since I moved to Los Angeles, and I never felt unsafe. I didn't today while I was eating an Onion Soup, and scrolling my phone mindlessly. I wasn't paying attention to anyone around me. And then I realized, my moment feeling safe, was no different from the moments Iryna and Logan had just before some--what shall we call them---spawns of the devil perhaps--dispatched them from this life with no more thought than if they were having a piece of candy.
I found myself looking around. The tables around me were empty. All the voices I could hear were friendly.
But I found myself angry. Angry that our leaders have allowed so many dangerous people to be next to us, and behind us, with all sorts of justifications and rationales that simply do not rise up to the most basic logic, or basic humanity, when it comes to that. While they fail to protect us, they tell law abiding citizens who see the marauders in plain and rewarded sight among us, they ought not have anything meaningful to protect themselves with.
But those two girls. Just starting in life. I come up against the fact that God "allows" this. He "allows" bad people to do bad things to other human beings--after all He allowed His only begotten Son to be murdered by His own creatures. It's the cost of giving us free will and wanting us to return to Him with and in love. And what a cost when I think of Iryna and Logan. And when I dare to think of the multitudes from the beginning of time to now purposively tortured, gassed, starved, experimented on because of human concession to the Devil himself, what a cost.
It becomes harder and harder to accept that God can make the incomprehensible comprehensible. But, of course, that was the lesson of the Crucifixion. What seemed an end was only a beginning.
But oh, boy, it puts faith through a ringer. And forgiveness? I am not really the one who is tasked with forgiving the murderers--who must never be allowed to walk free (and is it possible the fools who let them out again and again have learned anything? I despair even of that). Good thing. I am having a hard enough time not hating them and every miserable creature who ever took a hand deliberately to hurt another through the course of history.
They should have had their minute. Every one of them.
