POETIC COMMENTARY

A Five-Minute Requiem

October 10, 2002

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by David E. Reiser, MD.

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I’ve been thinking a lot these days about nuclear extinction. Thinking actually is not the right word. I’ve been sensing something. It arises from deep within. I feel it at the back of my scalp. And yet this sense I have is also everywhere around me. It envelops me in a tasteless, odorless, invisible gas. I can’t prove that it’s present, yet I have an eerie certainty that I’m right. There’s something all around me. It’s more than just the air.

As you might anticipate, I can provide no proof. If anything, there’s evidence to the contrary. Gobs of it. People seem remarkably unchanged. Being alive takes hard work, and everyone’s hard at work, applying himself to the task. Life all around me goes on exactly as usual. In the vast buildings that tower around me, babies are being conceived; while the old—and sometimes not-so-old—are dying.

In the interval of time between this alpha and omega (life’s only inexorable certainties), the rest seems up for grabs. My theory is—If you can imagine it, it is probably happening somewhere on earth at this very moment. Evil and good; valor and cowardice; greed and stinginess; sublime transcendence and ridiculous rootedness. Nor do these extremes manifest solely from person-to-person. Every one of us oscillates within ourselves with these dichotomies constantly. We humans positively thrum with conflict and ambivalence.

Somewhere, a couple is making love. Somewhere, someone’s got a bad case of the sniffles. Somewhere, a freedom fighter in a dictatorship is being tortured to death.

People are huffing their breaths right now onto mirrors, fretting about halitosis. Puppies are ruining shoes right now with their teething. And children who have never known a mother or a father are sleeping in corrugated boxes.

At this moment, men in the men’s movement are ventilating. At this moment, certain feminists (not all) are summoning their guile for their next foray into enemy territory—the family that still remains in tact. Lawyers are in their offices, counting up the daily receipts.

As I cross the street, I note in passing a woman in her forties. Today, for whatever reason, I can read minds. She weeps silently not twenty feet away from me. She weeps for whales. She understands intuitively in a way that I do not the love they feel toward one another. She grasps viscerally what science fails to explain—why it is that these magnificent animals remain in pods for generations. A man to my right is agonizing over our planet’s dwindling rain forests. A junkie looks frantically at his wrist watch for the third time in two minutes. A grandmotherly type picks up her pace. She is meeting a hit-man whom she’s hired to kill her husband. And everyone, without a single exception, is pissed off about something. Something or someone. We can take that as a given.

Because I do possess, however briefly, this preternatural ability to read minds, I find the absence of certain thoughts even more astonishing. Not a single person is saying to himself, “Any day now, any minute, may spell Armageddon for this entire planet.” Yet, I feel them suffer with the weight of what they dare not think. An ineffable solemnity permeates the world.

Right now, as I cross a downtown intersection at noon, I am jostled by people carrying attaché cases. I rub shoulders with the homeless. I keep my eyes peeled for pick pockets. I remember a quote from high school, long forgotten. ”The business of America is business.”

Herbert Hoover once said that. And, as the light changes, I see thousands of drably attired people who are living affirmations. And yet, when the crosswalk sign goes from red to green, I remain haunted by this sense that something is different.

I can’t begin to put it into words. But if I were a cartoonist, I think I could draw it. My sketch would look like this: Throngs of people are crossing a busy street at noon. From their heads there come forth streams of tiny bubbles that rise absurdly into the sky. This, of course, is the universal comic book signal that tells the reader—“Pay attention! People are thinking more than they’re saying.” In comics, this convention has always been indispensable. Perhaps this is so because, as is true in life, people seldom say what they are really thinking. Still, the pane I sketch here is unique in a specific respect. It possesses a critical singularity, never before observed in comic book history. The aerated globules of a thousand thoughts converge. A hundred feet overhead, they have all coalesced into a river that flows into a single scallop-shaped bay. Six simple words float there. This time, it might really happen.

Little can be said about the positive aspects of extinction. But its threat does offer two opportunities. First, it clarifies or all of us what really matters. And in that very recognition, it also chastises us for the way we squander our lives toiling over what is cruel, petty, and banal. As I step up onto the curb, I ask myself, “If I only had thirty minutes left, what would I do?” The answer comes quickly. I’d call my wife to tell her that I love her very much. I’d call the mother of my child to tell her that once I had loved her also, very deeply. And then I’d call my son, whom I haven’t seen or spoken to in over two years. I’d tell him how deeply I love him. I’d tell him how very proud of him I am. But, as I slowly put down the receiver, I would ache. I would wish that I could have seen just him once more. I would yearn to behold him break into a smile once more, just once more. And I would be racked with the pain of knowing that I would never, ever get to touch him, hold him, or hug him—ever again. Never. Not even once. Ever. The pain I feel is a shot gun blast fired from a foot away, right into my heart.  

Emily Dickenson once said, “Hope is a thing with feathers/ That perches on the soul.” For the last two years I have cursed her for it. For me, hope was a school of piranhas attacking in slow motion, as I trudged on in life, and was forced to drink its foul filthy waters.

Or so I thought. Emily, I was wrong and you were right. That exquisitely painful bird alighting on me for a moment, only to fly off again, has borne the only surcease I have ever known from this unremitting anguish. Now, the cage door hangs open and the cage is just a tangle of incinerated wire. This is vastly worse than the pain of futile hopes.

The ironic part is: when it comes to my son, this is my certain fate now. Even if all the saber rattling in the Middle East miraculously stopped; even if I lived to be a hundred—I will never talk to him, or see him smile, or hold him ever again. It’s true. And I ask myself why, given this, I don’t get up from this keyboard, stick the barrel under my chin, and squeeze the trigger? I don’t because secretly I am incapable of relinquishing hope. I wait for the faint brush of her wing again, if only for a moment. This is what keeps me alive. (Words to the wise— study our language’s clichés. They became clichés because of the truths they reveal. I am alive at this moment because hope is what keeps us all alive. I’ll shuffle into eternity au natural because hope does indeed spring eternal.)

All of these musings will be largely moot, of course, if presently we annihilate ourselves.  But if we luck out (again), and live to see another day, then perhaps we can put these insights to positive use. But this, you see, is the problem. I can only explain this by invoking another cliché—insight, at best, is fleeting. Like all other forms of pain, like dreams, epiphanies fade quickly, as soon as the pain that thrust them upon us remits.

Regarding my son…I never did get to say goodbye to him.

A few of you may remember a column I wrote for the Desert Light Journal, called "Letters to My Son." DLJ is not dead; simply on sabbatical. But as in life, death can linger or it can seize us suddenly, coming out of nowhere. With the DLJ, I just seem to have looked up one day and found that she was gone. For now, anyhow, she’s not the garrulous, outgoing, and cheerfully in-your-face publication that so many of us grew to take for granted. Its editor, Trudy Schuett, has placed it, for the time being, in cryogenic freezing. "I've got some situations that I simply have to deal with," Ms. Schuett told me. "I mean, sometimes in life, what can you do?" She quickly added, "But I'll be back. There are still some asses out there that need kicking." [i] I had an additional dependency on DLJ. The column kept hope alive for me. And besides, getting something in print was the only recourse the legal system had left open to me. To write my son a letter saying goodbye and hope that somehow he gets a hold of it. I appreciate the risks even here, but for now, First Amendment rights still mean a little.

As I write now, I try to imagine what a cryogenics facility might actually look like. I picture a vast technology park, the kind with sharply angular futuristic buildings, emerald lawns, and not a soul in sight. The corporations all have initials. ACG. DBX. CGI Industries—various task forces within the CIA, in other words. Somewhere, at the end of a cul-de-sac, I see a white, two-story building with rounded corners, whose windows are so darkly tinted that it looks like a portly detective in a linen suit, wearing trademark sunglasses, and crouching  behind a sprig of grass. It is here that I imagine Desert Light Journal lying in state. She dozes through at least this portion of the gender-wars, anyway, dreaming whatever it is that computers secretly long for. Her deliverance comes in brightly pixilated neon hues.

This lab is the gold standard by which all others are measured. Fatty Arbuckle, Walt Disney, Trigger, and that alien from Area 51 all lie here in state. I buy it anyhow, although the alien makes me uneasy. He’s curiously petite for an extra-terrestrial invader. Not only the texture but the color of his skin impart a strong resemblance to Gumby. But Leonard Nimoy said it right out on Unsolved Mysteries. Top secret military pathologists autopsied him. He was an alien all right. I’m not one to question authority and Leonard Nimoy did say so. Or maybe it was Robert Stack, Anyhow, they are all housed here. The completely unmemorable guy whose name I can’t recall said it eloquently on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous: “Anybody who’s anyone insists on coming to ICE when it comes time to get freeze dried.”

Still, at this moment, I imagine these…um… entities…in a separate wing. The sign over the building is modest. ICE (Institute of Cryogenized Entities) it says. The entrance to Suite HTML-227 is even more understated. The receptionist is effervescent but curiously robotic, with brisk strides, perfect teeth, and a metallically welcoming style. She offers visitors a cup of coffee or a Diet Coke if she can find one in the Fridge. She emits no odor. An android, in other words. Or, perhaps I should say, a Msdroid. She returns to her keyboard and silver-white ribbons of code at once commence to stream across the monitor. There’s also a little clock on the screen, but I don’t know what it means. ICE measures everything exclusively in sidereal time. The crisp and stylish cyborg sips occasionally from a Diet 7 Up, a terminal linked to a terminal.

ICE is preternaturally quiet. The Levelor blinds are all snapped shut, as tight as clenched teeth. It’s impossible to tell without a watch whether it is night or day. Still, I am incorrigibly optimistic by nature, and so I work hard to discern small signs of hope here. I can conjure the feeling, but only as a mute, never explicitly stated, cautious hopefulness, one expressed with crossed fingers in a lab-coat pocket.

Yet now, thumbing through a copy of Cryogenics Today, I find myself asking—what right did I have to complain about my paltry little agonies. There are so many men in this movement, for real, who have lost their children for many years, for decades. Right now, there are gray men in their seventies serving life sentences for sexual “crimes” on their children that they did not remotely commit. Science debunked the “science” of “retrieved memories” twenty years ago. Yet, their children still do not come to visit, and they still rot in these gun metal monuments to all that is cunning and sadistic. They fade away, permanently abandoned, and I suspect that to them death is no more than a different shade of gray. When I see matters from this perspective, I ask myself—how dare I to even presume? I at least had the good fortune of publishing a few pieces about my son (and writing a thousand more). Compared to the anguish of so many men who have lost their children to a tyrannical empire called a Court of Law, my own private grief seems selfish and small.

And yet, it may be that, in my very mediocrity, I have something worth saying. I am he, and you are me, and we are all together…[ii]

Life, as I once knew it, ended for me on August 31 2000 when a bored and contemptuous judge looked down his arrogant, blue-veined nose at me. He clacked his gavel, and that (as they say) was that. I had been brought before my child that morning, weeping, filthy from a night in jail, handcuffed, and manacled to a chain. After Judge Stoneheart thumped on his wood plaything, a couple of sheriffs appeared and presently reattached me to the chain of prisoners in the hall. I half-shuffled, and half staggered along. Stumble, and you felt a Billy-club poke into your kidney. "Keep a move on it, Pal." Pick up speed, and you got a Billy-club whacked across your knees. "Hey, hold your horses there, Pal." Then, they shove you back into a cell.

My crime? I’d left a phone message for my ex-wife telling her when the moving people were arriving the following day. I had just violated a temporary restraining order. The basis for that? Violence in my past? No. I had no history of violence whatsoever. A criminal history? Nope. I’d never been charged with a crime, much less arrested. Well, then, a tendency toward violence.,. Uh Uh. I have never lifted a finger to a human being. To my son, I have hardly ever even raised my voice. I had no history of prior arrests, no history of threats of violence. But my ex-wife wrote on the form---“I fear that he might have the potential to be emotionally abusive.” The day before I phoned my ex-wife as a courtesy (when I knew that she was at work) to tell her a detail about the movers on the answering machine. Her attorney had told my attorney that she intended to “relax” her request at a hearing on permanent orders scheduled a couple of days later. My son was going to drop all requests. “I never wanted any in the first place,” he said.

I was ultimately convicted. The statute I had violated is a municipal ordinance violation in Denver, Colorado. That’s less than a misdemeanor, akin to letting your dog off its leash in the park. But this arcane and obscure ordinance, and thousands like it, have been “unofficially reclassified” as crimes of Domestic Violence. These are the only non-felony “crimes” in the United States that are reported to job data banks in all fifty states in perpetuity. My “criminal” record may never be sealed. I am possibly unable to immigrate. My professional license is in jeopardy. I have been stripped of a constitutional right.[iii]

I went bankrupt taking the case to the appellate level (where I won), fighting for the right to see my son one more time (lost), and trying to immigrate to Canada (not resolved), where my new wife has long put down her roots.

I mention these matters not to demonstrate how unusual my case is, but to underscore how absolutely run-of-the-mill and routine it is.

As I write, a memory returns. The jail where I was incarcerated is three quarters of a mile from the hospital where I stayed at my ex-wife's side when my son was born. Even now, as I think back on it, I find it impossible to integrate these two realities simultaneously. And, in truth, after two years of thinking about little else, at the deepest level I still cannot believe that any of the last two years is even real. It is, of course. I know that. But, then again...I think that some who read here will understand what I am trying to say.

I never saw my son again. His last memory of me will be the squalid image of his father, in jail blues, clamped at his ankles to a chain.

When I first conceived of the column, Letters to My Son, I had hoped to particularize and personalize my situation not because I was someone, but precisely because I was no one. I had hoped that "Letters" might work a bit in the same way folk songs do. All folk songs are composed by the same person. His name is Anonymous.  Whoever really wrote them is long forgotten. He was no one in particular. And therein, I reasoned, possibly might lay their power.

I pictured my singer in my own mind as a cowboy, huddled close to the campfire at night, strumming chords on his guitar and making up a few phrases.

But why does one song ultimately endure, while thousands more are never heard again? I think the answer is that, mysteriously, something universal gets woven into a particular one. The song works because sometimes a nobody crying out to no one speaks to someone—our common humanity. We live in a world where we are bombarded with figures and statistics, all readily twisted to suit the political agenda of whoever chooses to interpret the data. Frankly, I think most of us have grown benumbed by pie charts and endless graphs. Worse still, our hearts have become annealed. In a folk song, there are no data. There is only an I and a thou.

Now, as I contemplate the end of life on this planet, a horrifying possibility occurs to me. Behind all of the numbers, buried under the avalanche of twenty-four-hour news reports, there are human beings. There are mothers, fathers, and children. Life at this level essentially remains unchanged. For us all, it boils down to the choices we make and the morality that we set in place as a result. As Yoda said, “There is no trying, only doing.” Whether we are good or evil, great or humble, in the end it all really does come down to choice. It’s a matter of I and thou.[iv] I fear that sometimes, behind the blizzard of data, and misinterpreted data, we lose the most important benchmark we possess—our own integrity and conscience.

I ask now to be sworn in as an expert witness because I am a human being. But I can now add to my dossier an additional bit of insight, painfully won. You never forget your child. You are never finished with your grief. Forget what the learned professors tell you in the textbooks. This kind of mourning persists for as long as we are alive. When you lose a child, sure—time gradually seals over the gaping wounds with keloid and scars. But the wounds never heal. They never go away. Ever.

There is something uniquely diabolical about mental agony that does distinguish it from all other forms of pain: the fatal wounds are invisible. You wear no cast. You have no jar with your gallstones floating in saline to hold up as proof. The pain you endure is borne exclusively within.

I gradually learned a bitter truth. Deep down, no one believed me, There are decades of prejudice to promote this, but there is something vastly more fearsome. A person turns to his own family as the only refuge from betrayal. In one way or another, if this betrayal occurs, the underpinnings of our entire culture are shaken apart. We ourselves? I believe that some great part of us is forever destroyed. The only remaining existential question becomes—what do we do with whatever remains? Oedipus Rex, Medea, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello. If you consider, every tragedy throughout history that has endured has had this betrayal as its central theme.

This is really what Parental Alienation Syndrome is all about. And with one out of every two marriages ending in divorce, PAS is present in almost all of them to some degree. The reason is simple: Money talks and bullshit walks. This is a major growth industry. Unfortunately, the commodity that we are selling short is our future, our own children.

I remember feeling gripped for a time with an urgency to convince someone, anyone, that I was not the monstrosity I had been reduced to in so many people's eyes. I think I understand this compulsion better now. The cause of your emotional anguish doesn’t really matter. When you suffer this torment, you're always buying a twofer. First comes the trauma itself…Then, the endless succession of blinking and incredulous stares. This second experience is, by far, the most traumatic.

Ironically, I believe that the person who has best described this feeling is TS Eliot. And he captured it in a poem written eighty-five years ago:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, when I am pinned and wriggling on a wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?...

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worthwhile

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

"That is not it at all,

"That is not what I meant, at all." [v]

Eliot wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in 1917, twenty four years before Richard Gardner was born and seventy years before Gardner published his paper first identifying Parental Alienation Syndrome.

I think that Eliot was describing the pain of not being understood by anyone, of not receiving empathy from a single soul. And, when I use the term "empathy," I do not equate that with absolute agreement. I wasn't seeking to be believed as much as I was hungering for someone to comprehend the anguish of not being believed, even a little, by anyone. No one did. Not one person, friend or foe. . I felt for a long time as though, in spite of the fact that my address on earth allowed me to cash checks and get telephone service, my experience of being alive was closer to that of being an asteroid tumbling in darkness at the fringes of outer space.

At some point, I answered Eliot's question for myself. No, I concluded the attempt to reach out to anyone was not worthwhile. It was definitely not worthwhile at all. Coolly and systematically, I commenced to recede from the human race. I gave up. I simply ceased to care. This happened when I realized that no one else cared. Not about me. Not about my child. Not about my ex-wife, who is seriously disturbed and, yes, suffers as well from her own hideous compulsion to carpet bomb everything in her life that she once cherished, including her own ethics and moral standards. I finally comprehended the harsh truth: It was, tragically, not I who was responsible. Had it been, at least it would have been easier to fix.

Who was insane? It was the entire legal system; a system that I believe is completely hopeless, totally beyond repair. If it ever did once stand for anything, it does not now. It is a mahogany-paneled, Doric-columned monument to its own collapse. Wherever you go in a courthouse, it seethes with metal detectors and cops. And for good reason. Its outrages by now are so extreme, and commonplace, and churned out at such a relentless pace, that those who rake in the money have every reason to fear their own citizenry. Beyond that, I sometimes wonder if the entire world—or at least that miniscule fraction that actually runs it—is hopelessly insane.

My credibility lies in my commonness. Our stories are all the same. I am you and you are me and we are all together,” is how John Lennon put it.

So—having had the gall to confer this much entitlement to address the court, allow me one final proposition:

“Your Honor, my credentials have already been established on the basis of the fact that I am no one in particular. I would like to speak to you about humanity, and then about one human being in particular.

Concerning the human race, we have grown accustomed during war to conducting body counts that measure success or failure by invoking numbers in the thousands. But parents, Your Honor, loose their children very slowly. They agonize for decades. And don’t listen to what they tell you in the textbooks. The agony is renewed every night.

Once, in a very long time, a moment in history arrives when even politics as usual must cease. I propose to you that this is such a moment.

I have a friend who had a fifteen-year-old son, a sweet and good boy, who died tragically in a fluke. He and several friends had been playing at the beach. She drew the dreaded suburban short straw—Chaperone! That day, she read, took a stroll, or dozed off. Then, at sunset, the beach blankets were folded. The parasols came down. The chairs were stacked in pillars of white. In the dusk they looked like gaunt sentinels. Soon there was only an empty ribbon of sand and the screech of gulls, the thump of a breaking wave. They found his body several hours later. He’d dug a cave in the sand and fallen asleep. The sand had imploded after a stray volley ball accomplished what hundreds of tons of strollers had failed to do the entire afternoon. I am certain that the final hours of the search must have been the most unbearable of all.

Twenty years have passed. Her house is filled now with tasteful photographs of this boy. It is not a mausoleum. Other children, now living and grown, intermingle. There’s a whole bumper crop of grandchildren crowding their way onto the coffee tables.

And everywhere there is always an abundance of fresh flowers.

As for Michael…I look into the open face of that fifteen-year-old refrigerator vacuum, and beholding the innocent larceny sparkling in his eyes, I have a feeling that wherever he is (or isn’t) he will always hold his own. I just feel terribly sad that I will never be able to draw wonder and hope from witnessing his future shenanigans.  Because alas, dead is dead.

My friend said to me one day, “You realize that what you are going through is much worse.”

I scolded her for her presumptuousness. “People always say things like that,” I said. “People who have not gone through this. Loss is excruciating in many different ways. Don’t diminish yourself like that.”

She said that to me almost two years ago. And tonight I called her, “just to say hello.” (A warning here to all readers: No one ever calls just to say hello. It doesn’t matter if he’s across the street or dug into a fox hole in Afghanistan. There’s no such thing as a casual call. You can count on this as surely you can be absolutely certain that when someone says to you, “Now I’m going to tell you the truth,” or, “Listen, I’m going to level with you”—the next sentence he utters will be a brazen lie.)

“You were right,” I said.

She was silent.

“It is worse.”

She didn’t say anything, but I saw the tears glisten in her eyes. I know that some of you may say, “How could you see her over a telephone?” To you, I would simply reply, “The same way you know something is true in your heart.”

I realized something else then. It is why I am always hounding people with my own favorite Hallmark greeting card truism, “Only love can conquer hate.”

At this moment in history, we stand at the brink of nuclear extinction. I truly do not know what the right thing to do here is. But I do know this: The weight of an entire planet will rest on George  Bush’s shoulders soon. The spirits of every youth who has bled to death in a foreign country will watch. The grief-stricken eyes of his tortured his parents—all will watch. The eyes of every mother and father holding their infant will also watch. All will be fixed on a mortal human being, with strengths and flaws. In a curiously oval-shaped office, they will watch him wear out the nap in a Persian carpet. And well he should. He holds the future of the planet in his hands.

I am not saying that we should not commence nuclear war. I don’t know. But I am just a person. I am permitted this fallibility. Bush’s ultimate curse and deepest source of loneliness will reside in the fact that no one will permit him that same latitude.

I pray that Bush will allow this of himself. If he does, I trust his decision implicitly. For even though billions are involved, ultimately they are all he and thee, thee and thou, thou and I. Humanity can perish in a flash. But people die one-by-one. Some have eyes as black as night, and their faces are hidden behind veils. Others have fair skin and eyes as pale as a melting stream. They are all human beings. We are all human beings. If Bush can see the humanity in himself, then I trust him to see it in a culture that superficially is so vastly different, but deep down where it counts is exactly the same.

I hope we will all pay homage to our dead. This is not a drama where, mercifully, the curtain will finally fall. It will remain open for the remainder of eternity. I pray that tomorrow, an audience will file into the theater’s seats. Humanity. So obnoxious, so brilliant, so determined to annihilate itself.

I am a man who has lost my only son. And yet, the hurt is so unbearable that I have not slept through the night in two years. I am writing this at three AM. I think that if we destroy this planet, God will die of a shattered heart.

My friend can deny it all she wants. But I see the truth in her eyes. A sun will never set when she does not think of him.

Can we agree to be silent for five minutes? Muslim and Jew; Christians and followers of Allah, man and woman. Can we clasp one another’s hand for five quiet minutes? That is all I ask. Please, honor us by joining this hallowed and mournful circle. Good! Now, let us all join hands.

And goodnight, my brave, good, kind, generous, and beautiful boy. Goodnight. I no longer sign my letters to you, “Goodbye.” There is no such thing.

To my son’s mother, too, I earnestly reach out. Please, take a hand. Just for five minutes. We must start somewhere.

President Bush, my thoughts and heart will be with you.

Now, five minutes of silence. Please. That is all I ask.


David E. Reiser, MD.

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David E. Reiser is a writer and physician. His books and articles in the 1980s addressed medicine's urgent need to make education and patient care more humane. Along with others, he quietly changed the way students are taught throughout the world. The New York Times described his book, Medicine as a Human Experience, as a textbook that revived "a long-lost skill" in physicians--"compassion."

In 2000, David lost his only son to Parental Alienation Syndrome. "Before my divorce in 2000," he says, "I had never been charged with anything worse than a speeding ticket...They threw me in jail and dragged me into a courtroom handcuffed, weeping, and manacled to a chain. The proceeding required less than ten minutes. I never saw my son again... I'm no 'expert.' I'm just one more broken man. I hope to do something positive with what is left of me. My resume is one line long--I am a father who lost the most beloved person in his life--my son. I do what I can now, not because I'm noble, but because I have no choice. I try to do the right thing because I sense that this is my only hope. My ideals are all that, in the end, they couldn't take from me. I refuse to accept a world where hatred routinely prevails over love, and where the destruction of our children is viewed as simply the cost of doing business. I'm no saint. I'm dazed and terrified. I'm not sure what "God" even means, and I'm sure as hell no hero. But I will stand up to any legal system, hateful mob, or totalitarian regime whose code of ethics is built around cruelty, power, and lying; and whose only god is money."