A solitary and pure flower.
He was only three years old and didn't deserve the sad life he had, much less the tragic death. His name was Ryan, and he was passed on to another couple because his own mother 'couldn't cope'. Another report says she wanted peace to redecorate her house, and gave £20 to the killer couple to look after him for her for a month.
This is tragic on a number of levels. How is it that a mother (not a Mum! A woman can be a mother, but only some make it to be a Mum) can sell her child for a month, to let her do some painting? Having given her child away, how on earth can she NOT know the kind of house and environment she is placing her child in? The people in the dock and charged with murder, are the couple who beat, and starved the child to death, and rightly so. But what about the mother? Does she have no guilt in this transaction?
This is yet another occasion where words defy us to describe the people who made this three year old's life a hell on earth. Maybe there is a clue in that last statement. We have become so sophisticated and modern that we have bought the lie that there is no evil in this world. No devil. No satan. But what pushes anyone to destroy a child's life, by inflicting over 70 wounds and marks on his face and body, locking him in a storage cupboard, and starving him until he died. This did not happen overnight. It took time. Day after day. The child would have been terrified, scared and lonely. Very lonely. Where were the people who should have protected him? The answer to that question is NOT the local authority. We are too quick to blame them for other people's actions. This wee boy was brought into the world by two parents. Where were they? Did they care?
It's time we admitted to ourselves that there is evil in this world, and it is alive and well in the society we have created. We hide from it, and we will find ways to excuse it, saying things like... the mother came from a deprived background. Or maybe, the adults in the boy's life were abused when they were children. We might even hear it said that we just need to educate our young people in how to raise children! Raising a child is not rocket science. Not always easy, but the human race has been raising children for a very long time.
What has changed? What about these thoughts? In the past 20-40 years we have seen a change in society's attitude to morality, and the moral authority of the church. Any church. Children are no longer taken to church by their parents, or indeed even sent to Sunday School. We know better nowadays, don't we? We let the children make their own minds up, and we have abdicated our responsibility as parents and society in teaching them right from wrong. That might be because we don't know ourselves anymore. The family unit of Mum (yes Mum), and Dad (not father) has been devalued. Yes, I do believe that there is only ONE kind of family unit, and it is NOT an Adam and Steve set up, no matter what the PC brigade tell us!
Some crimes are bad. Some are very bad, and some are evil. Why do we have such a problem is seeing evil for what it is? We are creating a nation of children, and young adults, who are living in a moral vacuum. Brought about in part by the older generation accepting the lie that we didn't need to worry about evil and morality. All we had to do was build better houses and make a better environment. That would lift everyone up to a higher place and make us all better people. Did it work? No! The trouble is that there seems to be no appetite to return to teaching morality at home and school, and the ability to see the traditional family unit as a microcosm of society. If the family gets broken, so does our society. And so we reap the rewards of our own making! Have we passed the point of no return? I hope not!
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