Sometimes, Justice Is a Pale Thing

But I am really proud of the jurors who made the right decision on Friday in the McStay murder trial. Their verdict was only announced today.

Thank You, Jurors! Good people, listening people, Thank You!

That was an exceedingly long trial. Not quite O.J. Simpson trial length, but it was working its way up there. It ran five months.

The evidence was clearly there. But there was so much obfuscation through overload (the defense strategy) that it risked jamming the jurors' gears. This did not happen. Instead, Charles "Chase" Merritt will be consigned to a small cell for the rest of his life. Doubtless, he will continue to manipulate people on the outside from there. Why let a little thing like a quadruple murder conviction stop your game?

Even if Merritt receives the death penalty, it is almost certain he will never be put to death in the state which let Charles Manson live long enough to be idolized by Axl Rose (who ignominiously recorded one of Charlie's songs) and then die of old age.

A family of four (including two very small children) was murdered, almost certainly within a matter of minutes, in a blitz attack in their own home. What a horrible reality this is to digest. Many people will live with the void which hangs there where four lives were flourishing. Not only their family and loved ones will miss them. Many who never knew them in the flesh mourn them, for in investing care in their fate we came to know them as individuals and as a loving family embarked on a wonderful adventure together. This absence stays with all  of us who followed this story from the early days of mystery to the later days of justice.

I wish peace for the McStay family. I wish peace for the family of the convicted killer. There is pain on all sides.

How many years of suffering in countless people one reprobate soul can unleash.

Often, justice is a pale thing, a pale shadow of something our soul wants to exist, call it God or karma or whatever you call that force you wish existed to set things right again in the universe. Justice is a shadow of that thing cast into our broken world. And it has to be enough. It is horribly never enough in tragedies like this one. But it is something. It is the contract between humans, the commitment to decency.

Decent people were murdered by a man who allowed himself to become a monster. Decent people stood up for the murdered and spoke for them and honored their lives with this verdict.

I hope people remember the great love the McStays had for each other, and cherish the people in their lives the way they did each other.

That would be Carver's "small, good thing." That is all we get here: the gift of translating darkness to light. We can hold on to the light of these good people. They are with us, still with us.

Flashback: Did You Ever Get a Chance to Read this Fascinating Article on How CNN President Jeff Zucker Fostered the Rise of Trump?

This article written by Jonathan Mahler for The New York Times Magazine back in 2017 was endlessly fascinating to me.

I had actually been googling to see whether anyone shared my viewpoint that CNN has largely ceased being a news network, as it advertises itself, apart from a few exceptions of largely obligatory reporting. In fact, the network seems to have developed an allergy to news not related to Donald Trump. It's largely just the Anti-Fox Network now.

Hey, I love hearing Trump-bashing as much as the next triggered snowflake, but please, not all day and all night.

Think of all the medical and technological breakthroughs about which we hear nothing on this news network, soi-disant. What about all the impending legislation in the states and at the national level (not directly related to Donald Trump) which threatens our civil liberties? These important changes go unreported.

I remember when CNN was all over the McStay family disappearance, which turned out to be the McStay family murders. Because it was ratings fodder. The story was huge then. Now the trial is underway and they have not reported one word on this attempt by the State of California to mete out punishment for this horrible familicide.

What I am no longer getting from CNN is the daily struggle of American lives.

What I am getting from CNN is the daily struggle of Beltway lives.

This is elitism at its worst.

But, if you read the above linked article, you will see CNN is raking in the dollars. And that's what Jeff Zucker was hired to do. So his conscience is clear, because his conscience is directly tied in to the network's profitability.

All the justice warrior CNN employees who fancy they have skyrocketed from mere news anchors to television personalities probably think they are giving America just what it needs. Witness Chris Cuomo's star break into his largely self-congratulatory prime time show. The more star-based CNN's programming becomes (and I mean those "anchor stars") the more unctuous it all becomes. Chris Cuomo's fawning upon his guests from the left and the right leaves me feeling how empty it all is. Cuomo dances a predictable dance every night. If anything changes, I'll be sure to tune back in. But I'm not holding my breath.

On one typical night on CNN, as someone from the left spouted the expected rhetoric, we could look over to the right side of the screen and watch as Rick Santorum's eyelids grew heavy and started to droop. Clearly, Santorum was starting to fall asleep. And can you blame him? Santorum's drooping eyelids were telling the truth about CNN. Everyone was just phoning it in. Everyone's there for a paycheck. This is a scripted "reality" t.v. show. Nothing truly shocking is going to happen. There will be no revelations or powerful moments. It's nothing more than entertainment now.  Chris Cuomo, self-styled justice warrior, might as well be on Zucker's earlier baby, "The Apprentice."

I find the best source for the real news today is online newspapers. Television news is in dereliction, because its very existence is tied-in too closely to ratings. Ratings skew our perception of reality, or they do if we rely on television news.

I understand why people might just fall into that pattern of trusting television news. And that's because it's easier and the passivity of the situation attracts us. But it's a big mistake to make, and we sacrifice so much if we let networks like CNN become the arbiter of what's really important in America today.