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Hearing Listening to the wind. Rain's a comin'.
A Clean Slate?
The Christian Science Monitor has a column in which the contributors grapple with ethical issues of various stripes, and the most recent is a real humdinger: It's from a daughter whose mother married a man who murdered his first wife. I realize that as described like that it just sounds like another Springer show candidate, but go read the column. You'll find the details -- both of the murder and of the relationship -- are complex and a lot less sensationalistic than you might think.
The article is from the perspective of the daughter, and some of the questions she has to grapple with are: How safe is her mom? Has this man really changed? When does trust come? All of these are extraordinarily difficult questions, and put in the same position as the writer of this piece, it's difficult to guess how I (and I would imagine, most of us) would deal with the same issues. And for everyone who clings to the idea that once you've paid your debt to society you should have a clean slate, it's a real challenge to one's beliefs when one of those "clean slaters" suddenly becomes part of the family.
Read the article. Then ask yourself how you'd grapple with the same moral quandary. It's a lot to think about.
Written by johnmscalzi Blog about this entry |
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9/22/03 11:41 AM