No Mercy
On July 5 the Tribune published a powerful essay about a mother driven to the ultimate act of love. For years 63-year-old Carol Carr had cared for her two sons while Huntington’s disease–which had already killed this Georgia woman’s husband–relentlessly destroyed them. But in June the suffering ended. She shot them in their beds.
It’s a measure of where we stand as a society that a statement such as this–contradicting old-fashioned absolutes–could be published today in a major newspaper. But as the nation grays we’ve all been haunted, in our imaginations if not yet our lives, by the specter of our loved ones’ unassuageable suffering. We’ve made it our business to comprehend that there can be worse things than death. It might even be said that Whittington was preaching to the choir.
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And so Drake’s strongest sympathies are claimed by the miserable whose misery we want to put them out of. “We’ve had a tendency on the part of journalists to identify more with the perpetrators than the victims, because the perpetrators are more like them than the victims are.” He’s observed a growing sentiment that “people who kill out of love should be treated differently” and a campaign “for a new classification of murder called compassionate homicide. You can only qualify for that classification depending on the characteristics of the victim. In other words, you can only go for compassionate homicide if the victim is old, ill, or disabled.”
Last New Year’s Eve a 76-year-old Oak Lawn man, Thomas Harrison, went to the bedside of his wife, Shirley, 74, shot her three times in the chest, then turned the gun on himself. His wife died, and he survived. The Daily Southtown story, headlined “Neighbors: Man wanted to end wife’s suffering,” reported that Shirley Harrison had been ailing for years from stomach and colon conditions and had been hospitalized at Oak Lawn’s Advocate Christ Medical Center since having a stroke. The headline the paper composed for its second story quoted the couple’s pastor: “It was very difficult for him to watch her suffer.” The pastor regretted not reaching out to the Harrisons, but privacy laws had prevented the hospital from letting him know a member of his parish had been admitted.
To the members of Not Dead Yet, the essay by Lewis Whittington in the Tribune was a perfect example of the press–certain of its own enlightenment–getting it wrong: romanticizing homicide instead of holding society accountable for its indifference to families like the Carrs. Not Dead Yet decided to take its protest to a new level. “We made a bunch of phone calls over the weekend,” Drake told me, “and got nine people together to go to the Tribune on Monday.” Another group at Access Living of Metropolitan Chicago was waiting to be summoned if needed.
Dold wouldn’t put it quite like that. Drake “seems to suggest they got an op-ed in the paper because of their protest tactics,” he E-mailed me. “That’s not the case. They got an op-ed in the paper because Mike Ervin and others are very compelling in how they explain their views. Mike wrote the piece I hoped to get, a beautiful piece.”
Months later this young National Merit scholar, whose brilliant wit I hopelessly envied, was off to an Ivy League university; the last I heard he was writing a book on early American history. His 18-year-old spirit lives on at the Sun-Times, which has a clear idea of what’s appropriate for its “impressionable young sports fans.” This isn’t about sexism. It’s about arrested development.
