I’ve been thinking about the girls in Ohio.
The story boggles the mind. It’s horrible and shocking and it’s hard to wrap your brain around it at all. I’m sad for them. My heart breaks for their families. I’m angry. Angry at the situation. Angry FOR them.
But, like much of the media and like many of you, I think about Charles Ramsey. The man that saved them all. He is their hero. Absolutely. But after all the media attention goes away, I wonder what he’ll be feeling. Glad he could help, of course. But I wonder if he’ll feel guilty for not helping sooner.
I hope not. But I know that I would.
I don’t know all of my neighbors. I see some of them out and about. The house to our left is holds some of our very best friends. We are friendly with our neighbors to the right and straight across. We have spoken to a couple other neighbors once or twice. But there are several families on our street that I’ve never met. And sure, I’ve seen the funny lady who is looking for her cat on a near daily basis, but I have no clue what her name is. (I do, however, know the name of her cat.)
I’m not implying that any of my neighbors are holding kidnapped women in their house. PLEASE KNOW THAT I’M NOT. I’m just saying, if they were, I wouldn’t know. I would be that person on the news saying, “I had no idea anything was going on. They seemed like normal people!”
How would I feel if something like this happened in my neighborhood? I’d feel shitty. I’d feel shitty and I’d feel so much guilt.
There isn’t a magic answer for any of this. I don’t expect one. I don’t have any desire to snoop on my neighbors. I’m no Mrs. Kravitz. And I certainly don’t want everyone knowing everything about me. It’s none of their business. I guess you could say there’s a slippery slope of being aware without being nosy. It’s coming to the realization that something like what happened in Ohio could happen to any of us in any neighborhood. Because we probably wouldn’t notice. We probably wouldn’t have any clue at all. Because how could we?
I don’t have any answers or pearls of wisdom. I’m just hashing this out as I think about it. This world can be so insane, sometimes you just have a take a few minutes to try and process a little bit of it. And then you just have to let your faith take over. Because making sense of it all is kinda impossible.