(I published this letter in our weekly paper.)
To the Editor:
I want to propose that we listen carefully to our disbelief and our grief as our community processes the murder of Joan Rosenthal. I did not know her or any one in her family, but I live here and I had to talk about this murder last night with my children.
It is scary. It is incomprehensible. It is shocking.
This morning, I read the quotations in the Marin IJ about people’s disbelief and about how they loved her and her family. The details of how they loved become specific. The loss is personal.
I read the police statistic that this is the fourth homicide in our community in 40 years. I want the magnitude of the atrocity to sound out, to sound out loudly. This should not happen. This hurts when it does.
But the horror and the shock of how she was killed remain. People feel stunned. This does not happen here. The outrage we feel when a murder happens to someone who is loved right here, where our children go to school, where we live and sleep and eat is appropriate.
There are two ways to go on this issue. One is to say, welcome to the real world.
The other, which I prefer, is to apply this current level of shock everywhere, to be willing to be outraged at all senseless killing, to feel profoundly the specificity of loss that each one ignites. Getting used to random acts of murder diminishes the loss and the love. It takes away from our humanity to say, well, it happens there, but it does not happen here. We become more human when we say, it is wrong that it happens at all.