Solution to A Problem

A few days ago, a 21 year-old man fired shots at the White House in the hope of killing our "anti-christ" President. Obama, who was in California at the time, was fine, as was the rest of his family. In fact, even the White House's bulletproof windows were fine too. The only thing the shooting really destroyed was the young man's life, as he is now on trial for attempted assassination of the President.

Joe and I talked about this story over the phone, laughing at how moronic of a plan it was. You would think that if you were going to try and shoot the president you would:

a) Make sure he was in the same state as you when you fired your gun.

b) Find out if the windows to his place were bulletproof or not.

c) Become a better shot, so that more than one out of every eight shots hit a large window, (if those windows in fact turned out not to be bulletproof).  

But the story, somehow, becomes even more interesting. Weeks before firing shots at the White House, this young man recorded a video of himself and sent it in to Oprah Winfrey with the hopes of getting on her show. 

On the tape, he says: "My name is Oscar Ortega from Idaho Falls, Idaho, and I feel like I am the perfect candidate to get cast on your show because not only do I have a solution to make a huge impact on this world with small changes to our daily lives, I also have with me the answer to worldwide peace."

He goes on, and loses a bit of credibility when he says: "Please do not take me as a joke or as a deception. I have never felt so sure that I was sent here from God to lead the world to Zion."

And later, "It's not just a coincidence that I look like Jesus. I am the modern-day Jesus Christ that you all have been waiting for."

Because Oscar Ortega is certifiably insane, we laugh when he offers an answer to worldwide peace, almost as much as we laugh at his reasoning that he is Jesus because he looks like Jesus.

This reminds me of an argument Joe and I make all the time, where we argue that we are related to someone because we share a first name with them. 

But odds are, we would also laugh if a tenured professor at Yale said he had a solution to end all violence in the world, though perhaps we would read what he had to say before we began to chuckle. Perhaps.   

World peace, poverty, economic equality -- those problems are too big to have singular answers, or answers at all. There will be violence. There will be hunger. That is life. 

While I hesitate to lump myself in the same category as a man who shot at the White House, I do believe like our mentally deranged friend, that I have a solution to one of the world's problems. 

I like to think there is a special place in hell for people who engage in, or profit from child prostitution. Not that the prostitution of adults is any better -- they're both hideous, distilled forms of evil. There's just something about the ruined innocence of a childhood -- the wounds and the scars that probably never heal. There's just something so inhuman about the sexual abuse of children that leads me to regard it as perhaps the most evil act on the planet.   

When I think of my childhood -- one filled with toy cars and baseball games and jumping on a trampoline -- and then I read about a ten year old Cambodian girl who gets tied down and raped multiple times each day by western pedophiles -- how do you even compare? How is that girl ever supposed to trust, let alone love a man? How is she supposed to sleep at night? Her life is torture. Mine was paradise. 

I read such things and wonder if God exists, and if he does, why doesn't he do something? I don't want to kneel before nor sing the praises of a God who is indifferent to the continual rape [both mental and physical] of these kids. Either He is too weak to protect, or too apathetic to intervene. I honor neither. 

To think that there are men capable of such things, to think that there are children who must endure such things, who wake up each day and know that they will be fed enough to be kept alive, not beaten enough to be kept desirable...  It almost paralyzes you with rage. And disgust. 

How do you a solve a problem like this? 

And I think the answer is simple. So simple even Oscar Ortega might have even stumbled upon it. 

You kill everyone associated with it. You kill the people who enslave and profit off these children. You kill the men who show up and pay for a room and ten minutes with a child. You kill them all, no pardons. If you can do what these men do -- on both the supply and demand side of the business -- then you've forfeited a right to a second chance, a right to a jury, a right to explain. You kill them all, until they stop showing up, until being involved in child prostitution is as certain a death as chain smoking, only much quicker and with a lot more blood.

And until they stop coming, you don't stop shooting. 


Because there is no high road to take here, no other cheek to turn. 


These people are monsters. Monsters who prey on defenseless children. We like to think questions of morality fall into a large gray area, both sides having equal and fair points. But there is no gray here. 


Stealing a loaf of bread to keep your family from starving is always the right thing to do; a human life is worth more than a loaf of bread. It is worth more than a wagonload of bread. And the life of a child, someone so malleable and trusting -- those who abuse that trust, those who exploit it for profit in the most heinous and grotesque ways? There is nothing defensible, no moral gray about what those monsters do to those children. They are wrong and always will be. 


And for that, they should die. Each and every one of them.