Act Four/Scene Three to A Complex Apology:  To Stay With Joy or Not?

SCENE THREE:    For those on our block, judgment calls were also necessary, maybe easier than the Judge’s but devilish nevertheless  The point of departure was:  Who is the real Joy?  Only it got complicated because it turned out the name she used in California was her birth name, and the Minnesotan we knew was an assumed identity taken while she was on the run from the law.  Not even Fred knew Joy was an assumed name, but neither Fred, nor her daughters, nor any of us doubted who the real person was – it was the Joy we knew, and while in prison she legally changed her name to Joy.   Whew……

Easier didn’t mean it was easy.  All of us did much soul-searching because an innocent bystander (a mom) died in the California shooting.  Certainly not an intentional killing, but the law rightly says (as for guilt or innocence) that when you decide to participate in a bank robbery with guns, you are responsible for all unintended consequences as well.  An innocent person is dead because of your actions, and a son is without a mother – permanently – unlike Joy’s daughters where the loss of mom’s presence, though considerable, was only temporary…. temporary, that is, if the family held together during her prison term.  Fred was great; the kids stayed great; the family all held together.  It still amazes how much normalcy Fred was able to maintain for the sake of his kids.

And somehow we all threaded this needle too.  Certainly it was easy to continue to embrace The Doc and his daughters – they were innocent of any wrongdoing.  But how would we embrace Joy upon her return?  It was even alleged she participated in an attempt to blow-up a police car with police officers in it.

The stream of consciousness went like this:

……….“Yah, it was the 70s……

……….. Yah, the police certainly had some blood on their own hands……..

…………….but No, you just don’t go taking the law into your own hands and fight fire with fire,

…………………..unless you’re truly in a revolutionary war……..

….……. .and Yah, you want Joy’s daughters to get their mom (the real Joy) back as soon as possible……..

…………but don’t forget how important the lesson will be for the Darylmple boys to find reason to believe or not believe in our justice system……..

…………and the biggest Whoa!:  someone got killed at Joy’s hands – and the fact that the police had killed her college sweetheart is not enough to justify it.”

The ethicist on our block posed the question:  Does it matter whether we believed her cause was just or not?  Would we still support her if she had been a Nazi collaborator rather than a civil rights activist?  Would none of her positive contributions to our neighborhood matter if she was once a Nazi sympathizer?

For me, the question was not whether her cause was just; the question for the ages is what choices would I have made under similar circumstances?  Would I have been mature enough to understand the ultimate facing of consequences?  Young, idealistic, and with reason to be revengeful.  In any war there are innocent casualties… but shouldn’t this “war” have been fought in the court of public opinion rather than out of the barrel of a gun?  I hope I would have chosen the former, but maybe that only comes with maturity.

Tomorrow:  The Apology