This won’t be a cheerful post.
On this day, October 12, 1998, Matthew Shepard, age 21, died as a result of a brutal hate crime. I took pictures of a few of the things that are in my photo album/scrapbook from that incident.
Pages from a Time magazine article.
A local candlelight vigil I attended.
Flowers brought by Houston mourners to a memorial.
I remember that October as being a dreary, cold one. Maybe it wasn’t; maybe it just felt that way. I was working in one of the worst jobs I ever had, for a group of the worst people I ever worked for. I remember sitting in my car in a downtown parking garage at the end of each workday until I could stop crying long enough to drive home.
I guess the date hit harder this year than normal because of today’s news about the judgment against the person who conceived and promoted the lies and conspiracy theories after the Sandy Hook school shooting. He’s been ordered to pay almost a billion in damages to the families of some of those who died. Like all con artists, he immediately denounced the ruling and began fundraising. People will send him money. They always do. I never want to understand him or the people who bankroll him.
I never want to understand how people commit hate crimes.
I wrote a poem about Matthew Shepard, though he’s unnamed, that began in my head when Tom and I were on a trip that took us through Wyoming in cold November 2000. I won’t put it here, but it’s called “Medicine Bow.” When I read it again today, it evoked all the sadness and imagined resolution I felt when I wrote it.
I can’t find words to write about what happened in Sandy Hook on December 14, 2012. I hope the families who’ve so ferociously fought the lies and the hate those lies provoked, further destroying their lives, felt some measure of justice today. I wonder if they can ever find peace. I hope so.
