Maynard grasps for the fundamental problem
Okay, there’s the obvious sense that, yet again, justice hasn’t been done. A woman murders five children in cold blood and evades responsibility. That’s the symptom we all witnessed, but let’s move beyond that and consider the underlying disease.
The core problem is that there’s always a price to be paid for evil, and the ideal of justice is that the perpetrator pays that price. When a perpetrator walks away, somebody else is going to pay. The price will be a subsequent loss of freedom for all of us. We live with more fear, and look with greater suspicion upon neighbors. We isolate ourselves from strangers. The politicians blame the tools, and make it harder to acquire anything that can be used as a weapon, such as a firearm or maybe (in Andrea’s case) a bathtub. Society becomes more hostile and intrusive and bureaucratic.
In a word, when we fail to administer individual punishment when it’s practical and appropriate to do so, we end up administering collective punishment upon ourselves.
I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t want to be overly regulated and scrutinized. I’d rather to live in a relatively free society where I’m allowed to get on with my life. I admit that it’s often a struggle to make the right choice. We’re all tested one way or another. When the test comes, it’s the knowledge that there will be consequences that helps keep us on the straight and narrow. If we’re not 100% good people in our hearts and minds (and we’re certainly not), then we’re motivated to fake it in our words and deeds.
And that’s what civilization is, boys and girls: A collection of people who agree to fake it as we deal with each other. We’re walking wounded, every one of us. We’re hurt and angry and ready to fly into a rage, and it’s a chore to remain civil and civilized. And if we want civilization and freedom to persist, then we’ve got to find some motivation to control our base natures. A big part of this motivation comes from a knowledge of consequences, either earthly or (for those who are religious) Divine.
The bottom line is this: Freedom and responsibility are linked. Responsibility implies consequences. If we fail to enforce responsibility, then we’ve got to curtail freedom. Is that the world we’re deciding to live in? Let’s hope not.
These are the things I think of when I witness the triumph of Andrea Yates.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that Andrea Yates is mentally ill. Even her husband agreed with the decision to place her in a mental institution. It is doubtful she will ever be set free to walk among us, so no one need fear Andrea Yates.
What is really tragic about this story is that there had to be signs along the way that she was disturbed. Why didn’t her husband pick up on them and seek help? Why did they continue to have children, when it seemed clear from all reports that her symptoms surfaced after the birth of their first and second child?
This is a tragedy that didn’t have to happen.
BAC
I’d like to mention just how very confused my children are by this verdict. My 10 year old looked at me in disbelief. He couldn’t understand how a mother could do that to her children, firstly…secondly how she could do it and not be drowned herself for doing something that awful to not just ONE child, but FIVE!!! I attempted to try to put this in some sort of perspective for him. I couldn’t because I found it completely unbelievable myself. I’m disgusted.
I might take some heat for this position but I’m going to say it anyway. Mainly because this whole case has been quite upsetting to me and I’ve thought about it some.
Of course every sane person feels incredibly sad about those poor children and no one has any real sympathy for Andrea. Well, not many people do anyway. I also understand Maynard’s point that consequences serve as a deterrent most of the time and help us to control our baser instincts.
Still, Andrea was very seriously ill. Psychotic. Her family knew it, her doctors knew it, and even the prosectutors in the first trial admitted it. She was diagnosed with psychotic episodes long before she killed her children and her life was one long downward spiral of mental illness for years. The woman was on Haldol for goodness sake. This was a person who had tried to kill herself several times, regularly self-mutilated, wouldn’t talk for long periods of time, hallucinated, etc. It was well known to Rusty after the birth of their third child. Even then, he urged her for more children and took her to a psychiatrist who took her off meds and urged her to just “think positive thoughts.”
The woman was also a religious fanatic who believed that all women are evil and that she was a bad mother. She rarely ate and denied food to her children at times as they should all fast. While Rusty did not share all his wife’s religious beliefs, he didn’t do anything to help her gain any level of reasonable stability in her life. He did not face the seriousness of her condition.
Toward the very end, her family was extremely worried about her and say she began hearing voices regularly, started mumbling to herself about her evilness, stopped eating and drinking almost entirely and still she did not receive competent help. The children were not protected. She just got sicker and sicker until those poor, sweet children paid the ultimate price. No, I don’t feel sorry for Andrea but I can’t help but think that the same opinions that deny the seriousness of her psychosis now are simply a perpetuation of the abandonment that left her and the children in such an unsafe, unstable position to begin with.
Those children died for failure to face reality and deal with it. Hopefully society as a whole and we as individuals will do a better job if ever confronted with such a problem. We have a responsibility to begin to take mental illness seriously – before it is too late for any more innocents.
I agree to a point that she is a sick person in desperate need of help. However, she should still spend the rest of her life in EITHER a mental facility or in prison not until they see her as fit to be released back into society. Her ex-husband should be given a cell a few doors down. They family admits they knew she was ill and yet they did nothing to intervene and this makes me sick. By looking away from what was staring them in the face (her illness) they enabled her to murder those children.
Well said, both Tammy and Vicki. I don’t know the details of the case well enough to add anything to the debate. I do know, however, that Noah, John, Paul, Luke, and Mary were not murdered by some tragic accident. It follows, then, that someone must be responsible for their deaths — if not Andrea Yates, then someone else. It is my hope that our “justice” system will live up to its name in this case, but I’m not holding my breath …
As the Foreman for the jury noted, there should be a “Guilty but Insane” verdict. Regardless of mental state, their still has to be consequences for murder. I would be OK if the time served was in a mental institution as opposed to a prison, but just saying that ‘society failed her’ isn’t going to cut it. She methodically drowned kids, there are no ‘buts’ here.
Maynard,
How many schizophrenics have you known? Sometimes it’s mild, just an hallucination every now and then. Sometimes it’s severe, with the patient caught up in an endless loop of hallucinations and delusions. Where no remedy avails and the victim is forever trapped in a nightmare.
Andrea Yates suffers from delusional ideations. She thinks Satan talks to her and tells her to do things. There is nothing she or anybody else can do about it. Not a damn thing. She has no more control over it than you do where the Sun will rise tomorrow morning. So long as she is under continuous supervision she can function after a fashion. But remove that supervision, let her assume full responsibility for her actions, and she will fall apart. No one can stop it.
One day she will meet God, I know He will be far more understanding than you can ever be.
Hey, Mythus, certainly God is more understanding than me or you or anybody else; what’s your point? What God does in the hereafter and what we’re supposed to do here are two entirely different animals, for the reason that our actions have earthly consequences and God’s do not. I assume that Hitler is roasting like a side of beef in Hell, but it’s possible that God has reason to put Hitler up at the Ritz. If that should be the case (and it seems unlikely to me, but my example is serious nevertheless), then I assume it would make sense to me when I was beyond life. On the other hand, any earthly authority that would treat Hitler like royalty would be an agent of evil, and God would expect us to acknowledge this evil and act accordingly. If the Hitlers of the world do not suffer earthly consequences, what message are we sending to the rest of humanity? You could certainly make an excellent case that Hitler was a madman; would you therefore suggest that he not be held accountable?
Some Christians interpret the “turn the other cheek” statement as a command to forgive. My understanding is that you turn the other cheek to a metaphorical slap in the face; the image conjured up is when the other guy brushes his glove across your face to challenge you. In other words, you turn the other cheek to a personal affront or insult, not to an overt act of aggressive evil such as murder.
As the Talmud (Ecclesiastes Rabbah, 7:16) says, He who is merciful to the cruel will end up being cruel to the merciful. This is the lesson we take away from the story of King Saul, who was merciful to the evil Amalekites, allowing their king to live. He later ended up being cruel by entirely wiping out Nob, the city of priests, for the alleged crime of harboring David.
Hi Maynard, I hope you don’t mind that I nose in a little here. I read your post a bit ago and thought about why Hitler is constantly invoked these days and how it might apply to the Yates case.
I just want to say that I don’t really understand the comparison of Andrea to Hitler. I think that if Andrea were ever to be well, to be sane, she would not be able to live with what she did to her little ones. She is a woman and a mother, something Hitler will never understand. Also, I think that she believed she was saving them, saving them from the devil. Were she ever to be straightened out on this, she would not be able to face her actions.
When I hear of Hitler I think of an architect of destruction. Not someone who actually killed anyone at the death camps but someone who had others carrying out his wishes, demands, orders. A self-serving, hateful individual who truly had little regard for life outside himself.
If we are to make a comparison to Hitler and the Yates case, I would say the only possible comparison would be between Rusty (the husband) and Adolph Hitler. He was the one fully aware and informed and effects and of consequences. An individual who, in spite of the doctor’s advice and his own personal acquaintance with the situation, twisted and manipulated others to suit his own purposes resulting in tragedy and death of innocents.
I am not accusing Rusty of this. Only that I think a more fair comparison to Hitler is through Rusty.
Maynard,
Is Andrea cruel? Is she capable of cruelty, or is it the cruelty of those who know not what they do? Are we speaking of a functional human being? Or are we talking about someone so essentially disfunctional she cannot be trusted outside of a tightly controlled environment?
You talk of cruelty, but know nothing of the word.
I have clinical depression. Without my medication I would be in a despair so deep only death would seem a viable way out. I would not be rational. I would not be responsible. My only thoughts would be of ending my own life as soon as possible. I know this because I have gone without medication. I know what I’m like without it.
Without treatment I am not a good man.
Andrea Yates is ill. Because of her illness she is like a child. You cannot, in all honesty, hold a child responsible for what he does. Not in all truth. You can punish the child when he does wrong, but ultimately you must be responsible for what a child under your care does. That is a simple fact of life.
Her children are dead, you can’t change that. She is delusional and paranoid, you can’t change that. You can either put her in a place where she can be watched and cared for 24/7, or you can inflict punishments upon her to make yourself feel better.
A story was published years ago. In it a thinly disguised Timothy Mcveigh was cloned and the clones sent to the families of the victim. Their charge was to kill their clone, as a way of gaining closure.
It was vengeance, and that is all. There was nothing of justice in it. The clones were not Mcveigh, could never be Mcveigh. Hundreds of innocents died because they had the same genes as Mcveigh.
Then there were those who didn’t die. Who though adult in form had the minds of infants. Forced out into a world they could not comprehend. Infants created because somebody was convinced that Timothy Mcveigh had to die multiple times for his crimes, ignoring the fact that no matter how many times you cloned him, you could never recreate him.
It is not justice you want, it is vengeance. In order for punishment to have any value the punished must understand why they are being punished, and learn from the punishment. Andrea Yates is incapable of understanding the why of the punishment. Andrea Yates is incapable of learning from the punishment. Punishing her would be about as useful as a penis on a jellyfish. What you ask for is spiteful and cruel.
It’s time to go on. It’s time to go back to life. Back to the living and the joys and sorrows that lie ahead. You can do nothing for Andrea Yates’ children, please stop parading their bloody shades before us. Let their souls be, and be you concerned with the living.
Vicki, when we carry the discussion in this direction, we run into this wall: We can never know exactly what’s going on in another person’s head. All we can know for sure is what they did. Your interpretation is that Andrea Yates did evil under the delusion that she was doing good, whereas Hitler did evil with the full knowledge that he was doing evil. Certainly these are only assumptions on your part, and questionable assumptions at that. Yates dialed 911 after murdering her children and proclaimed herself to be evil, didn’t she? It’s clear that she knew she was doing evil. I don’t know what was in Hitler’s head, but he claimed to be saving the world, and many of his supporters believed him. I doubt any Germans intended things to work out as they did. But, as I say, only God and the individual in question can really know the answers to such questions. That’s why I try, as much as possible, to steer clear of assumptions that I cannot test. We know Andrea Yates is a murderer, and we know that she knew murder was wrong. The rest is speculation. I’m expressing the situation in its simplest terms; I understand that in the complex real world, we cannot help but blend facts and speculation. But as much as possible, I’d prefer to maximize dependence upon provable facts and minimize the guesswork. Eventually God will make the perfect judgment, but I’m not Him, and in this world I’m playing it the way I think He would prefer it.
Mythus, I think vengeance is perfectly appropriate when applied to a perpetrator or enabler of evil; obviously to exact a penalty upon a clone would be absurd, since the clone did nothing. If my broad validation of appropriate vengeance makes me an uncivilized primitive, then so be it. But actually vengeance isn’t the first argument I’d make, and I don’t particularly like the word “punishment”. Punishment is what you do to a child. No, I think I’d prefer to stick with the word “consequences”, which was what I was originally speaking of. Okay, I think that Yates was legally and morally culpable and should suffer criminal consequences, and you disagree. I guess that’s all there is to say.
Thank you, Maynard. I am drinking my morning tea now. Blessings to you and also to Mythus.