May 11th, 2009

My favorite movie is a western entitled Once Upon a Time in the West. Charles Bronson’s character spends the entire film tracking Henry Fonda’s character and it isn’t until the very end of the movie that he finds out why. Fonda’s character murders Bronson’s character’s brother. Just shooting Fonda down when Bronson meets up with him won’t do. He has to make him suffer like he’s suffered. An instant death is too good for Fonda’s bad guy. In the end Bronson enacts perfect western justice. Only at the point of dying does Fonda learn what he did and why he has to pay. It’s a brilliant story and for a brief moment satisfies the desire to see the villain get what’s coming to them. Real life isn’t like that. Evil flourishes and there’s nothing that can be done. No prayer, no polite words of tolerance can make it right. Yesterday I received an email that included a photograph of the interior of the home my brother once owned with the woman he used to be married to. The picture was of a party and my brother’s ex-wife and her new husband were standing where my brother stood at one time. It’s not enough that I lost my brother and live with the image of his broken, raped and beaten body in my mind everyday, but now I have another heartbreaking image to think on. I believe there are many cruel individuals involved in this scenario. People with malformed souls who think they?ve gotten away with sending an innocent man to prison. If the person who sent the email had hoped to hurt me again, congratulations. It worked. I’ll never get over it and you’ll never get caught. Things would be different if this were a Charles Bronson movie though.