Arkansawyer

Using technology from top Silicon Valley companies, advertisers are creating a new breed of digital signs that can be customized depending on a viewer’s age and gender, and on the age, gender, and intent of the person standing next to the viewer, standing behind the viewer, or looking furtively over the viewer’s shoulder.

“Anyone can microtarget advertisements to individuals,” said Norman Davidson, chief privacy officer of FaceFacts, “but our new FaceFacts API (FFAPI) allows microtargeting of groups. Not just as individuals, but by inferring their social relations and serving ads targeting the needs uppermost on their minds at that time. Let’s show some examples.

“Here we see a couple shopping for an engagement ring,” Davidson said. “First, facial recognition lets us ID both of them. Now we drill down, and there are their names and ages–that’s his real age, by the way, not what’s on his driver’s license. Back up and over to the biometric readings. Note his pupil dilation. That’s good for an extra three to ten percent markup at the jeweler’s. We get a taste of that.

“Now, look closely at this one. You’ll see one gentleman in the foreground and another in the background. The man in the background has been arrested three times for assault and robbery. We’re going to suggest pepper spray to the man in the foreground and, as he passes and the man in the background approaches, a nice set of handcuffs.”

Okay, I’ll bite. The ten(nish) books that most influenced me are these, which I read well before I turned twenty-one:

1. Billy Bass, by R. W. Eschmeyer From this book I gained two things in particular: The “fact” that fish don’t feel pain and a visceral revulsion toward pollution.
2. The Golden Treasury of Natural History, by Bertha Morris Parker, and The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, by Robert Brent and Harry Lazarus Our friend and veterinarian Doc Sturdivant gave me the Treasury when I turned six, and I discovered the Experiments in the St. Paul’s library in second grade. I still have my original Treasury. My parents gave me (over time) two copies of the Experiments; I know where one page of one copy is.
3. The Freddie the Pig series, by Walter R. Brooks These books fueled my imagination, with the Federal Animal Republic, the clockwork boy, the overt anti-communism, the whole enchilada.
4. Marie Curie, by an author I can’t place I also discovered this at St. Paul’s Lutheran in second grade and it’s stuck with me over time. One dreadful detail of fact haunted me for years: jura Znevr erprvirf Cvreer’f rssrpgf, vapyhqvat gur pybgurf ur jnf jrnevat jura ur qvrq, fur pbzrf npebff n fpnes ba juvpu cneg bs Cvreer’f oenva unf pehfgrq. (to translate)
5. Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein These books bent my mind, in both good and bad ways, and the traces remain to this day.
6. The Year’s Best Science Fiction, 7th Edition, edited by Judith Merril There are about a dozen pieces in this anthology who helped shape my thinking: Fritz Leiber, Shari Tepper, Fredrick Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, Mack Reynolds, James Blish, Leo Szilard, Cordwainer Smith, Maxine Kumin, Edward Gorey, Kit Reed, Anne McCaffery, Lawrence Durrell, Alice Glazer, Merril herself. All Merril’s anthologies were good, but this one was great, at least for me.
7. The Wanderer, by Fritz Leiber, and Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delaney These two books, as different from each other as War and Peace from Ulysses,  were the earthier side of my Heinlein obsessions.
8. Sometimes A Great Notion, by Ken Kesey It’s the best novel written in English in the twentieth century, in my opinion.
9. First Course in the Theory of Equations, by L. E. Dickson, and Calculus, third edition, by George B. Thomas These books opened my mind to higher mathematics. The Dickson book was a way of thought that I’d never before encountered; Thomas developed basic calculus in a way that eventually made real analysis much easier and much more meaningful.
10. Another Roadside Attraction, by Tom Robbins Robbins’ unashamed sensuality and iconoclastic sensibility fit me perfectly at the time, and I hope does to this day.
11. Illuminatus! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson and Masks of the Illuminati by Robert Anton Wilson Books full of lies, truths about lies, lies about lies, lies upon lies. Truly a case of the abyss staring back.

There are other, possibly more disreputable books I could put on, but this is my list. I’m not sure where I’d cut it. It seems Mad Magazine and The National Lampoon should be on there, too. There are also books I read much later which are, in their way, influential on me. What we read when we’re young, though, that’s what grooves into our brains. ”What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a chlid?”

A little Easter gift for you: Rev. Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock: “Lamentation” Friday and the Power of Love:

Heloise understood compassion as something more than full identification with another’s pain and sorrow and the internalizing of the most abject, abyssal suffering. For her, compassion was more than subjective feeling, weakness, and devotion. Her compassion maintained a tensile consciousness that combined empathy for another’s pain with sufficient self-possession to be able to offer to someone mired in his own suffering a world beyond pain and helplessness, a world glimpsed in community and companionship—a world that offered, still, the possibilities of love, of friendship.

For once, I don’t have words of my own to add:

The Prime Minister has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the “appalling” way he was treated for being gay.

Alan Turing, a mathematician most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes, was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ in 1952 and sentenced to chemical castration.

Read the whole thing.

via Making Light

It’s wonderful, isn’t it, to hit a piece of writing that runs right along ideas you’d just been mulling over and thinking of how to express? Not just your thoughts, different in some particulars, but right up next to yours:

Our congregational culture proves to be a barrier to many people who would otherwise love to be a part of us because they love what we love: the promise of personal and social transformation through free religion. Of what does this culture consist? From comments shared by Rosemary Bray McNatt, following on the heels of Paul Rasor’s lecture, this culture is a matter of aesthetic and lifestyle preferences: “We don’t own TVs, don’t like gospel and pop music and definitely don’t like rap, are unapologetic nature lovers, eat locally, say NO to shopping at Wal Mart, listen to NPR, love Garrison Keillor, read ahead in the hymnal to see if we agree with the words we are about to sing.” But, says Rosemary, “how does this allow us to encounter people whose experience of church is different? What’s their entry point into our congregations?”

Just for grins, how do I stack up against that accounting?

• Don’t like TV.
• Do like gospel, pop, and rap (and am left cold mostly by classical music)
• Love nature and get along well with my relatives who hunt
• Eat whatever’s cheap
• Shop at WalMart and have a Sam’s Club membership
• Listen to NPR for news and the occasional musical program
• Have gotten sick of Garrison Keillor and his small world
• Am more concerned about staying on pitch than the words I’m singing

Add that up and I’ve got about a half-unit of Ethnitarianism, maybe a little less.

I particularly take issue with lifestyle choices as a marker of enlightenment. The free market has a marvelous way of making collectively irrational, globally disastrous results out of the most rational and well-intended decisions, which is my pragmatic problem with substituting private choice for public planing. I also don’t like allocating virtue by what one can afford to pay for food. As I read recently:

When I discussed religion with Nicaraguans this past winter, we talked first theology, then social justice, then the specifics of social justice. Wow, did we have different priorities based on our cultural context. For them: things like food and stable government. For me, things like ethical eating and marriage equality.

This brought back an LA Times opinion piece:

I am black. I am a political activist who cares deeply about social justice issues. I am a lesbian. This year, I canvassed the streets of South Los Angeles and Compton, knocking on doors, talking politics to passers-by and working as I never had before to ensure a large voter turnout among African Americans. But even I wasn’t inspired to encourage black people to vote against the proposition.

Why? Because I don’t see why the right to marry should be a priority for me or other black people. Gay marriage? Please. At a time when blacks are still more likely than whites to be pulled over for no reason, more likely to be unemployed than whites, more likely to live at or below the poverty line, I was too busy trying to get black people registered to vote, period; I wasn’t about to focus my attention on what couldn’t help but feel like a secondary issue.

I’ll add it’s not just about black people’s issues. As Jasmyne Cannick goes on to say:

Does someone who is homeless or suffering from HIV but has no healthcare, or newly out of prison and unemployed, really benefit from the right to marry someone of the same sex?

That describes a good friend of mine, a gay man in the Bay Area, a skeptic toward the drive for gay marriage. He’s got no real healthcare and he’s HIV positive, with good health due to his current access to medication. Gay marriage doesn’t do him any good. For instance, it doesn’t get the people in his extended gay family the ability to intervene on his behalf in health care decisions.

Anyway, read the comments to Cammick’s piece and you’ll see a mindset working similar to that Anthony David describes:

Pathways definitely taught me that Unitarian Universalism, as it is practiced in most if not all of our congregations, is an ethnic religion with cultural norms. Violate the norms, and you are in trouble. Free religion only in mind but not where freedom most fully and truly resides: in the heart and in the body.

You can’t escape from culture (though you can pretend to, which is easy), but you can change it (which is hard). Here’s another aspect of that culture:

…the whole thing, from first to last, was so solemn, so earnest, so suggestive of … overfunctioning. I sensed behind it all a larger pattern—a troubling pattern—which I will call “the Unitarian Universalist superego.”

Historically, our UU superego can be traced back to our Boston Brahmin forbearers, though the form it takes today reflects great distance from those social movers and shakers and the transformation of many years. Now it is a moralism that combines masochism with workaholism. Every evil in the world becomes our problem—its very existence suggests some kind of collaboration on our part, unwitting if not witting. And since we are interrupted Calvinists who have rejected the guilt-discharging techniques of our ancient ancestors without replacing them with anything else, the sense of guilt just builds and builds. Can’t get away from it. Our backs ache from the accumulated weight. We have become guilt-grubbers. We look for ways to kick ourselves.

I personally witnessed this recently, visiting another Unitarian Universalist congregation. A good friend of mine was to deliver a lay-led sermon on “Obama’s Accountability and Our Responsibility for his Promises”. Now, that’s a good topic and could generate a good sermon. Instead, it became a laundry list of items, some positive, some negative, with that same workaholism under it all.

Anthony David then moves, as my thoughts have been moving, to Mark Morrison-Reed and “The Perversity of Diversity” (diversity being right up there with tolerance in my personal lexicon of dysfunctia). One excerpt from his talk is, I think, apropos right here:

Our earnestness is sabotaging this project because guilt always deals cruelly with vision. … Trepidation encourages timidity. We’ve got to lighten up, laugh at our mistakes, apologize for our gaffes, and forgive the inevitable blunders.

And there it is: Perfectionism. The desire to be simply good. The inability to act from fear of doing something wrong. The noted science fiction writer John Scalzi gave over his blog to Mary Ann Mohanraj  a few months back, or, as he puts it, “Mary Anne Mohanraj did me a mitzvah recently and did a thoughtful and very interesting guest entry on racism (two actually). She makes a two-part, nine-point argument in the first entry, and her final point there is:

You will get it wrong. This is what you should do.

And she tells you in the second part:

After all this — after your research and honest effort and cross-checking and passing the story by members of the community — odds are, you’ll still get it wrong. That’s okay.

Sure, it sucks when someone points out that that some minor character of yours feeds directly into a massive racial stereotype. God, that stings. Maybe you just weren’t aware of that stereotype at all, so it’s pure ignorance on your part. More likely, you were familiar with it on some deep unconscious level, inherited from the sea of racism we’re all swimming in, and it shaped your character-building without your even realizing it. Ouch.

But when this happens, and it will, the key is in how you respond to it…

If you, on reflection, agree with the criticism, then it’s good to note that publicly. Apologize, if you feel the need, although I’m often not sure that’s actually necessary. I’ve found that it’s generally enough to say, “Wow, I totally didn’t see that. Thanks for pointing it out.” And then move on, resolving to do better next time. You will almost certainly get better at creating character of color, with practice. You will mess up less often. (Or perhaps you will simply make different mistakes, and that’s all right too. Writing is in large part about the journey, not the destination.) Sometimes, if you work hard, with the grace of whatever gods help poor writers and fools (in Hinduism, I think that’s Ganesha), you may get everything exactly, perfectly, right.

Let me repeat the part to which I added emphasis:

And then move on, resolving to do better next time. You will almost certainly get better at creating character of color, with practice. You will mess up less often.

Why is this important? Back a couple of steps in her argument:

A lot of writers are hesitant to take race on — white writers are worried about writing people of color, and even people of color become hesitant about writing other people of color. I feel some of this too — in particular, I worry about writing black American characters. I worry about getting it wrong, being offensive, contributing to damaging cultural stereotypes, making people mad at me. I worry about this so much that I don’t think I’ve written a single black character yet. Coward. Yes.

(I find it fascinating that Mohanraj, whose fiction writing shows such control and mastery overlooked that she has written a black character in one of the stories on her site, a character who both cuts against the grain of some black male stereotypes and and with the grain of others, in an inconsistently lifelike way, a way that is integral to the story.)

If you start thinking about all the ways in which you can get things wrong, it’s easy to be paralyzed by that fear, to retreat back to only writing characters who are just like you, or so vague that they can’t possibly be mistaken for anyone real. But again — that makes for bad fiction. If you’re going to write well, you have to get past those fears. Your library of characters contains the whole human race, and you have both the right and the responsibility to portray any member of it in your work. You just do your best to get it right.

That’s as true of people in the world as it is of writers in the story. (This touches on my own personal theology, a faith in people and stories, not necessarily always in that order. I’ll make that digression some other day.) If you pick one thread to follow from this entry, Mohanraj’s pair would be of immense value to anyone accustomed to using story as a metaphor for life and interested in knowing the other.

As this blog entry spirals out of control, I think I’ll end with one more note from Anthony David:

What if, for example, this grace and this health were the focus of the opening worship at General Assembly, every year? Starting out, not by reciting an earnest litany of social evils and injustice, but by remembering and invoking the grace and the health in which we live and move and have our being? The President of the UUA, saying, “Here we all are, gathered together again, and the Spirit of Life is with us as well, within us and between us, leading us towards more strength and more healing and more peace. Let’s see where it takes us, in our time together. Let’s expect to be surprised. Let’s see where we go….”

Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

More empathy for an easy target:

When the signs started to become clear, that the boy wasn’t right, that he was too isolated, underdeveloped, imperfect - we laughed, we stared, we assumed. He was our first boyfriend before he became our crazy cousin - always family.

We didn’t see the pain, we saw the bizarre, and we are vultures for scandal…

When it became clear that the boy’s face we had loved had become the face of a man who didn’t love himself; we judged him. We tore at him and he fell apart. He was living proof of the impact of our rabid pop culture, an early sacrifice to the new mechanisms of fame which allow no privacy, no time to learn, no mistakes.

Get that: “the new mechanisms of fame”. Welcome to the machine.

It’s distressing when a right-wing figure is involved in a sexual pecadillo, just as it was with Mark Sanford.

First come the left-wing homophobes, explaining that he’s obviously a closeted gay. Next the gloating over hypocrisy, which (unlike the gay-baiting) has an ethical leg to stand on, until the glee begins to wear on me. Finally, the crowing over the usual resignation, or the indignation over staying in office, whatever, is okay when you’re making a moral stand on someone else’s failings:

Talking tough is easy when it’s other people’s evil
and you’re judging what they do or don’t believe

This morning, I stumbled onto someone who found the empathy for Mark Sanford I’ve been looking for:

He begins to feel that his life has no integrity, no meaning.  Everything seems flat and tasteless.  He endures this condition for months, then years.  He thinks he will never be vital and alive again, as he once was. There was a time when he had dreams, when life seemed full of possibility, but now he plods ahead, one foot in front of the other, one day at a time, day after day.

Then Mark Sanford meets Chapur.  They have a few drinks.  She smiles.  She listens.  She touches his hand.  Both his body and his emotions respond, and he is swept into a new world, a world where the flesh is tied to spirit, and he feels regenerated.  The life force that he thought was gone forever has returned, in spades.  He knows only that he has to be with Chapur.  Nothing else matters.

Not that it keeps him from ruin, but perhaps ruin is what he needs. Everyone suffers:

I had a dream; aw shucks, oh well
And its all fucked up, its shot to hell
yea-eah, my shit’s fucked up
It has to happen to the best of us
The rich folk suffer like the rest of us
It’ll happen to you.

And so what should Mark Sanford do?

I think he should choose life.  I’m not sure if Chapur is that new life, or just represents it, but he has been dead, and he has a taste of what it means to be alive, and he should follow that leading…

Right now Sanford is torn and confused.  He has to choose.  He may think that his choice is between two women, but this is not the case.  His choice is life, or not-life…

It’s a well-said piece, kind to Sanford but not uncaring about his family. Read the whole thing.

Read the whole thing:

As several people have noted, in a sane world Sanford’s previous attempt to increase the misery of the poor people in South Carolina would be a much greater disability than his forgetfulness about his marriage vows.

This one, too:

Ken Starr set a rotten example, and it would be too bad if his critics now became his imitators.

With any luck, you’re going to get to have sex thousands and thousands of times in your life. Try to enjoy it every time. Get contraception, NOW! so you aren’t bound to your biology. Practice safer sex. Experiment. Find out who and what you want. Have fun but stay clear of the needle–oops, that’s the “What about intoxicants?” talk. Hmm…maybe it should be a “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll–My Own Private Holy Trinity” talk. Anyway…

One other thing: Anyone who tries to make you feel guilt or shame or fear over your sexual activities, including not having sex, is a prick. If they give you a legitimate excuse, you have my permission to punch them. How you treat people, including those you have sex with, is important. If you treat someone poorly, whether it has to do with sex or not, you’ll feel guilt or shame over that. So don’t do that, and, if you do, try to make it right.

What I’ll tell adults before and while my daughter is in her teens:

Here, let me sniff that. Hmm…smells like moralistic bullshit to me. Try feeding that to my daughter and and you’ll be eating it yourself. Now hit the road. Okay, next! Hmm…you aren’t out to hurt her. Drop by anytime!

This is an outrage:

FORT SMITH — A Sebastian County circuit judge has dismissed a lawsuit accusing Fort Smith police of negligence after a woman was fatally stabbed in a busy intersection.

Circuit Judge James O. Cox dismissed the suit filed by relatives of Christina Springs, who was stabbed to death by her estranged husband, Thomas Springs, after he rammed his car into hers in 2005.

Christina Springs did everything right. She got a restraining order against her husband. She went to a women’s shelter. She called the police when her husband violated the order and, in front of witnesses, threatened to kill her.

Now she’s dead.

Restraining order? Thomas Springs went to the school his children attended, violating the restraining order against him. He threatened to kill his wife. When the police arrived, did they arrest Mr. Springs? Why, no:

[Officer Brad] Lokey said that only one of three protective orders against Thomas Springs ordered him to stay away from the school. Because of the inconsistencies in the orders, Lokey said he ordered him to leave the school.

Women’s shelter? The Crisis Center for Women did their part of the job:

Kim Horton, a caseworker for the Crisis Center, testified that on Jan. 7 [, 2005] Christina Springs was transported to a women’s shelter in Tulsa for safety reasons, because her husband had been driving around the safe house in Fort Smith where she had been staying since leaving him [the month before].

Christina Springs returned to Fort Smith on Jan. 17 so she could appear in court the following day for a hearing on an order of protection she had requested, Horton said.

Three orders of protection and seeking a fourth, transported out of town after being stalked, and still, the police couldn’t protect her. The Fort Smith police couldn’t arrest a stalker who violated a court order.

But the police were called and promised to protect her. Ought to be helpful, wouldn’t you think? No:

Lokey, who left the police department in 2006, told Christina Springs and her sister that he would follow them as they drove to a women’s shelter where Christina Springs was staying, according to the lawsuit.

Lokey followed the women for a short distance, but the collision and stabbing happened after he stopped following them, the suit said.

In a reply by city attorney Rick Wade, Lokey claims he told the women only that he would follow them a short distance to make sure Thomas Springs did not follow them as they left the school.

And he did follow them, for a little while. Then perhaps other duty called. Or maybe it was break time. Maybe police officers don’t value women’s lives very highly. Who knows? This is what happened next:

Thomas Springs’ vehicle, a station wagon, then turned from a westbound lane on Rogers Avenue onto Greenwood Avenue, crashing head-on into [Christina Springs’ sister Kelly] Repking’s Honda, Repking said.

Thomas Springs approached the passenger side of Repking’s vehicle and yelled to his wife, “Roll the window down, bitch!” Repking testified. He then broke out the window with his fists, began punching Christina Springs and smashed her head into the dashboard, Repking said.

Thomas Springs left briefly and returned with a knife, which he used to stab his wife repeatedly in the chest, Repking said…

Let’s pause for a moment and skip the worst of the story, as sad and pathetic and predictable as you can imagine, and go to a comment on the story by one “MarkTheNarc”:

To the Springs family I offer my condolences in the murder of Christina; to Judge Cox I offer my praise for your sage decision. Even if Officer Lokey had been directly following Ms. Springs when her car was rammed, there is NO guarantee that he (Lokey) could have exited his unit and in time to stop her murder. In my opinion, this is another frivolous lawsuit that was a burden on the entire court system. [emphasis added]

Look at what happened and how long it must have taken:

• Thomas Springs rammed the car transporting his wife and his two-year-old daughter.
• He broke out a car window.
• He punched his wife.
• He smashed her head into the dashboard.
• He left and returned with a hunting knife.
• He stabbed her twenty-four times.

No guarantee? Guarantee is another word for promise:

• If, as he’d promised, Officer Lokey had followed Repking’s car to the shelter, perhaps Springs would’ve been scared away and not rammed the car. Springs didn’t ram the other car till the police stopped following. He might’ve run away.
• If, when Springs rammed the car, Officer Lokey had hit his lights and siren, Springs might’ve hesitated. He might’ve run away.
• If, while Springs was busy breaking the car window–not easy–and beating his wife, Officer Lokey had approched him, he might’ve hesitated. He might’ve run away.
• If, even if all Lokey did was call the incident in and then gone about his day, perhaps another officer might’ve gotten there more quickly. Perhaps an ambulance might’ve gotten there in time for the EMTs to keep Christina Springs, who took twenty minutes to bleed to death, alive till she got to a trauma center.

People on the scene tried:

Amanda Conrad of Fort Smith, who was in her pickup behind the Honda, testified she drove the pickup up to the passenger door to try to push Springs away from the window where Christina Springs was being stabbed. She said he jumped over the pickup’s hood and continued to stab Christina Springs as she tried to crawl out the car’s driver’s side.

She considered backing up to try to block Thomas Springs from the driver’s side but saw others were intervening.

And tried:

Robert Baker testified that he tried unsuccessfully to pull Thomas Springs away.

Mark Efurd testified that he took a crowbar from his vehicle and hit Springs once on the arm.

Brian Thomas testified that he and other passers-by forced Springs to the ground and held him until police arrived.

Can you imagine what this must be like?

[Christina Springs’ caseworker Kim] Horton testified that she happened to be stopped at the intersection and witnessed the attack, although at first she did not realize it was her client who was being attacked.

That’s even worse than being an EMT arriving at a wreck turned fatal by lack of seat belts. Working at women’s shelters is not well-paid work, in money, but liberating women from domestic violence must be rewarding. Watching one you’d done your best to help stabbed to death, right in front of you, bleeding out for twenty minutes because the police couldn’t be bothered to arrest the killer–I can’t imagine that.

No guarantee? I’ll give you a guarantee: When the police and the courts don’t take violence against women seriously, women die. That’s a guarantee, and that’s a promise, and that’s a crying shame.

Christina Springs’ relatives claim Lokey promised to follow the women all the way to the shelter and his failure to do so was negligent and a violation of their constitutional rights. They also argued Lokey had information to justify an arrest at the school, which could have prevented the murder.

“He (Lokey) had no control over Thomas Springs, and the eventual murder of Christina Springs in a busy intersection could not have been foreseen,” Cox wrote.

Is the aptly-named Judge Cox an accessory after the fact to Christina Springs murder? No. He’s just responsible for the next one, if the police don’t learn to take violence against women seriously.

Are the Fort Smith police guilty of negligence and depraved indifference? Judge Cox says no. I say they didn’t make as much effort or take as many risks as the bystanders who tried to help Christina Springs.

Did Thomas Springs kill his wife, Christina Springs, in front of her sister and his two-year-old daughter? Did he make their children orphans? Yes.

Yes, Thomas Springs killed his wife, with a big batch of help from a legal system that didn’t give a damn about Christina Springs’ life, her childrens’ lives, even Thomas Springs’ life. None of them had to suffer like this, none of them had to die–and Thomas Springs is scheduled to die and leave their children orphans, one more needless cost of a series of bad decisions and official thumb-twiddling.

If you look around–I saw them, but won’t point to them–you’ll find the gun strokers who say she should’ve had a weapon (dying must’ve been her own fault, payback for thinking she had the right to live free from fear of violence in a free country), and the hang-’em-highers who salivate over the eye they’re getting for the eye that wasn’t theirs to give (but hey! it all evens out in the end, right?).

What I didn’t see, anywhere, was any sign of what the Fort Smith police are doing to keep the next woman alive and the next man from killing her.

How it should’ve ended was with Christina Springs alive and free from violence and fear. How it should’ve ended was with two parents alive for those children. How it should’ve ended was with Thomas Springs held to account for battery and stalking and violating court orders, and with a chance to learn to make his life a better life, through whatever means a hard-headed, compassionate judge might impose.

How did it end? It hasn’t. Those children are suffering, and will continue to suffer. Thomas Springs’s life is over, though it hasn’t ended. Christina Springs’ relatives are suffering. The witnesses will never forget what they saw. The same good hearts that powered those who tried to help will leave them hurting over their failed attempt. That poor caseworker, the shelter workers, the first responders, all of them, all suffering.

[Then-police chief] Reed is now Fort Smith city administrator. Lokey left the department in January 2006.

How nice that it’s worked out for them.

By the way, Christina Springs is still dead. That’s all the ending there is.