Over the many years of writing this column, reporting or commenting on all kinds of tragedies, I have often turned to a friend and said, “You’re lucky if you get through life without . . .”
Without drug addiction in your family.
Without a parent who was an alcoholic.
Without marrying — or seeing your daughter marry — someone who turned abusive.
Without being the victim of random violence.
Without serious mental illness in your family.
Without having a gunman walk into your husband’s office and start shooting.
Without having to bury a son or daughter.
Some people will say they “feel blessed,” crediting a merciful god for their lack of scars. I just call it luck. Living among more than 300 million people — kind people, brilliant people, stable people, troubled people, ignorant people, violent people — in a nation congested with cars and trucks and guns and booze and drugs, you’re lucky if you manage to get through life without some horrible thing happening.
A friend’s 23-year-old sister was murdered by a serial killer along a Maryland highway in the 1970s. After the shock, my friend said, came “despair, followed by sadness, followed by a fractured family … every person scarred forever in some way or another.”
The worst is the death of a child.
That’s every parent’s nightmare.
And if we were to describe subsets of that tragedy, it would be to lose a child to a violent act, something that has happened hundreds of times in Baltimore during the city’s epoch of drugs and gun violence. It’s happened to a lot of parents. It happened to parents who merely sent their kids off to school for the day (Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Parkland).
“I can’t even comprehend the randomness of it, such a very violent crime in such a quiet and small town.”
That was Patty Morin, the mother of 37-year-old Rachel Morin, speaking to The Baltimore Sun’s Maria Morales last fall about her daughter’s brutal murder in August on the Ma & Pa Heritage Trail in Bel Air.
Patty Morin lost a daughter, and worse — if it’s possible to distinguish the suffering of others from a distance — five children lost a mother, and in a way that takes your breath away.
Even in the storm of local and global news that swirls around us, with so much daily violence, Rachel’s death stood out. It was shocking because of where it occurred. Harford County is not known for homicides, and the Ma & Pa Trail, converted from an old railroad corridor for hiking and biking, is a popular public place.
If you thought about this tragedy for more than a minute, you had to feel sorrow and sympathy for Rachel’s family. Had to take a moment to contemplate five kids losing a mother. Had to think about Rachel’s mother, losing a daughter like that. Had to take a moment to feel blessed — or just lucky — to have gotten this far without such a horror happening to someone you love.
Your instinct would not be to politicize a family’s tragedy — not even after learning that the man accused of killing Rachel Morin is an undocumented immigrant and, authorities say, a violent one connected to other crimes. That’s because you have a sense of decency. You have that thing called informed perspective. It’s because you know, from just living in this country and following the news, that America is a violent place, with most of the violence inflicted on Americans by Americans. You might even know, from having read the conclusion of a Stanford study, that, going back 140 years, far more crime has been committed by U.S.-born citizens than by immigrants. Just the same, as you probably know, immigrants have always been demonized.
If you’ve followed along, you know that Congress has been unable to fix our broken immigration system for years. There was an opportunity when George W. Bush was president, again when Barack Obama was in the White House, but both bipartisan efforts collapsed.
You know we need immigrants, but we also need border enforcement and a humane system to deal with the thousands of people who are trying to escape poverty, terror and climate disaster.
You also know, because of the noise level, that some people exploit the country’s lingering immigration problems for political purposes. Like sharks that need to keep swimming to breathe, it’s what they do.
“American citizens are not safe because of Joe Biden’s failed immigration policies.”
That is from Rep. Andy Harris, Maryland’s one Republican in Congress, in one of four Facebook posts about the Morin tragedy, adding it to his party’s line of attack on the Biden administration, driving fears of an “invasion” by immigrants who, Donald Trump says, are “poisoning the blood of our country.” It’s the predictable, cynical reaction of Trump supporters, and Harris is not only one of those but a big fan of Viktor Orban of Hungary, with his authoritarian government and harsh anti-immigration policies.
Earlier this year, House Republicans rejected bipartisan efforts to fix the problems at the U.S.-Mexico border, so now Harris gets to keep carping about them. If nothing else, he’s a good soldier who follows orders to fixate on the border problems on Trump’s behalf.
Even if that means exploiting a family’s tragedy.
