A couple of recent weekends saw me flat out on the sofa, trying to rid myself of some horrible late-winter, early-spring virus. Ugh. Since I couldn’t do much except cough and grab for yet another tissue, my reading attention span was pretty short-lived. (Add the effects of cold medicine and you’ve got the picture!) Check these good reads if you’re out and about on the internet.
The Last Trial: Writer Elizabeth Kolbert seeks to understand the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, from Nurenburg to the more recent trials of Oskar Groning and John Demjanjuk in the February 16 edition of The New Yorker. (The article was especially powerful considering recent anti-Sematic attacks in Denmark and France.) Most poignant was Kolbert’s discovery of Gunter Demnig’s Stolpersteine (stumbling block) project in which the artist embeds small brass plaques flush on sidewalks, memorializing the last known place a Holocaust victim lived before being taken away. Now thought to be the “largest decentralized memorial in the world” Elizabeth Kolbert commissions one for her great-grandmother and attends the installation. Over 48,000 Stolpersteine have been laid throughout Europe.
Your Son Is Deceased: Stephen and Renetta Torres received a phone call that would turn their world upside down. A neighbor’s call interupts a meeting to let Stephen know that cops have their house surrounded and a bomb-sniffing robot is working its way up the driveway. Knowing the only family member home was their mentally ill son Christopher, they rushed home only to be kept out of the “kill zone”, as one officer called it. As the story unravels, we meet the confused and agitated young man who couldn’t follow police commands and lost his life; the grieving parents whose faith in the system they served was broken; the witness whose testimony was ignored.
A Prosecutor Repents: Another great post by writer Rod Dreher whose blog is a treasure trove for those seeking to put news stories in some sort of cultural and spiritual context. Here a Louisiana prosecutor writes a letter of apology to an innocent man he prosecuted years before. Glen Ford was represented by inexperienced lawyers, a witness gave false testimony, and he was sentenced to death by an all-white jury. Former prosecutor Marty Stroud speaks eloquently about his decision that the death penalty is wrong. (Warning: the video embedded in the post is on autoplay and so will begin when you open the post.) NPR interviewed Mr. Stroud on All Things Considered today.
This is my symphony 