Sage Aragon – Lola's Curmudgeonly Musings

The Black Angel of Council Bluffs

The Truth is More Horrible Than Fiction

He Deserved More Dignity in Death

In Bay City, Michigan, a 93-year-old man froze to death inside of his home because the electric company had put a limiting device to limit the amount of electricity the man could use becaue of $1,000 in unpaid electric bills. The temperature in the house dropped below 32° Fahrenheit, and Marvin E. Schur died “a slow, painful death,” said Kanu Virani, Oakland County’s deputy chief medical examiner, according to an AP report.

Schur died of hypothermia, which he would have felt first in his extremeties as a burning sensation in his fingers and toes. Hypothermia causes a gradul shutting down of the body’s whole system. Schur was found by a neighbor on Monday morning.

Merry Christmas Sage and Bear

In Jerome, Idaho, on Christmas Day, Robert Aragon set out with his two children, 11-year-old Sage, and 12-year-old Bear, to take them to their mother’s house just one town away. The temperatures were bone-chillingly cold, and there were snowdrifts on the side of the road. Soon, Aragon’s truck became trapped in one of the snowdrifts. Instead of wrapping up his children while he worked on digging out his truck, Aragon decided to choose another solution: He had his children get out of the truck and start walking the remaining 10 miles towards their mother’s house.

Sometime after the children had been put out of the truck and told to start the long walk down the country road, Aragon managed to get his truck free. Good new, right? Did the caring father drive as fast as he could to pick up his children?

NO. He drove back home to Jerome. The children’s mother called to say that they had never arrived. Please note that this means that this cretin of a human being had never even bothered to see if his children had arrived. When authorities found Aragon around 10 p.m., he was at the site where he had put the children out of the truck.

Unbelievable, comments are divided on Aragon’s decision. Some people are trying to be forgiving: “Who knows what went through his mind? It’s just so sad,” said Ron Choate, who owns a diner in Jerome. “Sure, the dad was dumb to let them walk, but he probably didn’t think something bad was going to happen.”

Others are less kind: “I am sure that the jail cell Mr. Aragon is now occupying is much warmer at night than the snow bank he provided for his daughter,” Pat Brownfield of nearby Twin Falls wrote in a letter to the local newspaper.

Within hours after the children began walking, Sage, dressed in pink pajama pants, a shirt, snow boots and a down coat, was dead from hypothermia. Bear was luckier. When he was found, he was wearing only his long underwear. He had become delusional from the hypothermia, and was found in a deserted, single-stall rest stop more than 4 miles from where the children started walking.

Snowdrifts at the site where Bear was found were around four feet high, and rescuers had to climb over the drifts to get to the boy.

But this is not the end of the story. Also in the car with Aragon on the night was his cousin. Both men face up to life in prison for second degree murder and felony injury to a child. A judge later dismissed charges against the uncle.

When I read this, what I could not believe were the number of comments from people who were arguing for Aragon, saying what a good man he was, how “a jail sentence is too harsh.” I find these comments simply unbelievable. A good man, a good father, does not put his children out in frigid temperatures, dressed in pajama pants to walk ten miles. A good father, upon freeing his truck, does not turn around and drive home.

Of course we do not have all of the facts in this case as to why the children were living with their father and not their mother, why their mother did not go searching for the children when she found out they were missing. There are a lot of glaring omissions to this story. But two key facts stand out:

Fact number one: He took his children out in the cold and put them out of the truck.

Fact number two: He did not go and get them when he dug out his truck. No. He went home.

I, for one, am totally without words.

(From the AP. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090113/ap_on_re_us/death_in_the_snow)

It’s Not My Job

In December in Brighton, England, two Emergency Medical Technicians had a discussion on whether or not they should perform their job, that being whether to attempt to resuscitate 59-year-old Barry Baker, according to The Times of London. An unidentified source said that the EMT’s arrived in reponse to a call that Baker had placed in November after suffering a heart attack.

But after entering the building the two technicians were dismayed by the condition of the building and wondered aloud whether Baker was “worth saving.” Unfortunately for the technicians, Baker had never hung up the 999 emergency call, so everything that they were saying was being recorded, every petty, horrible, inhumane little piece of tripe that oozed from their shiftless, judgmental lips was recorded for posterity so that now, the entire rest of the world can sit in judgment of them.

(from UPI.com, http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/12/31/EMT_workers_arrested_in_British_death/UPI-55681230750341/).

And Through It All, We Pray to Remain on the Side of the Saints and the Angels

Lady Macbeth feared for her husband because in her estimation, he was weak. He had too much kindness in him:

“Yet doe I feare thy Nature, It is too full o’ th’ Milke of humane kindnesse.”

And it was true. He did not have the blood-letting capacity innate to his wife. But in the end, it drove her mad.

These people who treat life as if it is a coin to be tossed so lightly, bear it without the weight of its consequence. Why surely, God cannot “send to eternal pain a man who has done something toward improving the condition of his fellow-man. If he can, I had rather go to hell than to heaven and keep company with such a god” (Robert Ingersoll).

These people, these faceless companies who have not a thought for the lives they place in the balance when they put ignominious limitations on life-giving heat should be forced to sit in houses in which the temperature dips below 15º Farenheit, and no one looks in on them except for during the “thick night . . . and dunnest smoke of hell” (Lady Macbeth, Macbeth).

The man who makes a choice wholly inconceivable, disposes of children like small animals, left thoughtlessly by the roadside to freeze in the snow, “For a plot hatched in hell, don’t expect angels for witnesses” (Attorney Robert Perry, making summation to trial of John DeLorean).

“My whole soul pants for light and relief on these questions. But I get neither; and in the distress and anguish of my own spirit, I confess that I see no light whatever. I see not one ray to disclose to me why sin came into the world; why the earth is strewn with the dying and the dead; and why man must suffer to all eternity. I have never seen a particle of light thrown on these subjects, that has given a moment’s ease to my tortured mind . . . I confess, when I look on a world of sinners and sufferers-upon death-beds and grave-yards-upon the world of woe filled with hosts to suffer forever: when I see my friends, my family, my people, my fellow citizens when I look upon a whole race, all involved in this sin and danger—and when I see the great mass of them wholly unconcerned, and when I feel that God only can save them, and yet he does not do so, I am stuck dumb. It is all dark, dark, dark to my soul, and I cannot disguise it” (Albert Barnes).