Disbelief Can Kill.

When I say disbelief can kill, I'm not speaking metaphorically. I'm thinking of Aiko Koo.

She was a fifteen year old hitchiker who made the terminal mistake of accepting a ride from Edmund Kemper, the "Coed Butcher," on September 14, 1972. He drove to a deserted spot and showed her a gun. It should have been clear what was going on, and what the stakes were. But disbelief must have offered its siren song.

Kemper got out of the car and locked himself out of it. "She could have reached over and grabbed the gun," he said later, in an interview, "but I think she never gave it a thought." She wanted so much to think this wasn't really happening. She must have wanted to think of it as a delusion, a mistake, a joke.

She unlocked the door and let him back in.

Let me repeat that.

She unlocked the door and let him back in.

Her remains were not found until the following May.

Edmund Kemper had a high IQ, and despite his large size, an ingratiating manner. The day after he killed Aiko Koo, Kemper was questioned by two psychiatrists, since he was still on parole for killing his grandparents. He'd enrolled at a community college where he'd made good grades. He'd become drinking buddies with local police officers. No one knew about his extra-curricular activities. So the two psychiatrists declared him no longer a danger to society and he was a free man.

It's somewhat understandable that a bright person who had become adept at hiding his true nature fooled psychiatrists and cops. He was on his best behavior with them. He wasn't in front of Aiko Koo. She had every reason to believe he meant her harm, but she didn't want to believe it.

We are all confronted with unpleasant facts. We know, intellectually, that not facing unpleasant facts allows them to become more unpleasant. Yet, all too often, we don't face them anyway.

Usually it is not as clear as the situation in a out-of-the-way spot in a California September. There is wiggle room, there are extenuating circumstances, there are abundant rationalizations for us not to face unpleasant facts. Facts are rarely as unpleasant as they were for Aiko Koo, not as stark.

Yet... and yet...

She unlocked the door and let him back in.

That is the power of disbelief.

And it could kill you. Metaphorically, or otherwise.

Without the War

I mourn the loss of those dead in the Iraq war.

I also mourn those who lost their previous life, dead in the Iraq war.

The latest statistics I have read equate one dead to every six wounded. And usually, greviously wounded, unable to take up the life they knew before. Whether destroyed in either body or spirit, there is a great deal of loss for us to mourn.

And that's not even counting the civilians of Iraq, who never had a say in anything that went on, and no longer even have a home to think of going back to.

I say this to allow us to understand what I mean when I say: Where would we be without the war?

Where would we be?

If Bu$hCo, that great juggernaught of profit over life, had passed up this opportunity, and instead just concentrated on the water-on-rock drip of lowered services, predatory financial practices, and slow descent into indentured servitude: would people have woken up in time? Would they have rolled along, cursing the insidious grip without realizing its deeper meaning... without the war?

Without the war, would we have the Democratic majority that just took office today?

Terrible loss brings with it a reorientation of priorities. Concepts emerge from the mist of misunderstanding in sudden, stark clarity. What is going on? the populace wondered. Someone is dead, someone has come home so grievously different than what they were before, and what is the purpose?

What was the sacrifice for?

Bush has come out with that freighted word, sacrifice.

And it makes us wonder.

With wonder, with re-evaluation, comes enlightenment.

I wonder, myself, what the country would be without the war. Without that terrible rallying point, without that undeniable reality, would business as usual gone on as before? And for how long?

Past the point of no return?

It may be small comfort. It may be no comfort at all. But I do think our soldiers sacrificed for the ideals on which our country was founded. They did give up their lives for us to be able to consider all that we have at stake. And I think they did save our country. Their lives, all of their lives, past, present, and future, were for us.

I think, without the war, people would not be awake.

It was the point. Our freedom, our rights, our lives.

It was not in vain.