Kids and Creeps

I have to be very careful with this because it is a sensitive subject, but I have a problem with the continuing saga of JonBenet Ramsey and the return of her alleged killer.

First, this John Mark Karr (they always have three names) is a creepy MoFo to begin with. He has that Lee Harvey Oswald blank stare that tells me I'd better not trust him to look after my cat let alone my child. His head is too big for his body and he wears his pants way too high - but I digress.

Before takeoff from Thailand, Karr took a glass of champagne from a flight attendant and clinked glasses with Mark Spray, an investigator with the Boulder District Attorney's office, who sipped orange juice.

That's a little odd, don't-cha-think? Is champagne an appropriate beverage for an alledged child killer?

Mostly though, I have a problem with dressing a child up like an adult and parading her around in beauty pageants and whatnot. It would appear to me that the parents could have used psychological counseling somewhere along the line, since children are pretty much powerless to do anything about the circumstances in which they find themselves other than acceptance. To JonBenet, it must have seemed normal while to the rest of us it looked a little creepy - speaking of Karr.

Children have a limited time to be kids. Sending them out in public dressed like little beauty queens in real beauty pageants robs them of the time they have to be little people, and instead, thrusts them into the realm of adulthood - for which there is ample (if not overly so) time to exist.

It is strangely similar to the Little League World Series that is going on now. We have taken children and placed them in a spotlight to which they are either unwilling or unaccustomed to performing in, and in the name of entertainment (for their parents' sake) they do our bidding. "Hey, look at my kid!", they scream. As for the the kids, they know no better, but the parents should. Children trust us to look after their best interests, and those best interests sometimes get confused with the adult's best interests - namely winning. Sometimes, we take our own wants and desires and throw them at our children, expecting them to adapt as we would.

Sadly though, they sometimes fall prey to predators such as Karr (allegedly) and their adolescence works against them. They trust adults - sometimes too much - and expect them to always act in their best interests, but it ain't necessarily so. To most of us they are cute kids, but to some they are objects of desire and we cannot forget that, because the desire outweighs the cuteness when it comes to fulfillment of their desire.

What we are left with is ten years of searching, accusations and uncertainty, while the child is no longer with us to be a cute kid, a beauty queen or merely a child, which is what she should have been to begin with.

Cruelty to children and animals is a bigger problem than society would like to admit. They are defenseless to our wishes, and sometimes they end up as JonBenet did. It is a sad fact of life that otherwise worthless people like Karr are allowed to roam the Earth, while children like JonBenet are not.

Now, the case has developed into a media circus, with 24/7 coverage on networks that were pretty much created for such things. Runaway brides, missing children, weather disasters and other such situations are the purpose of networks that would otherwise have to run commercials and educational programming, but are now able to track the flight of a Thailand-to-L.A.-to-Boulder airplane that contains the type of person who should have been dumped out of the plane over the Pacific Ocean, but instead is the focus of public interest.

I'd rather watch a kid run around a playground with their friends, rather than do my bidding on a stage with a sash and a smile.