I've been hearing for the past couple days about a 2-year-old whose grandmother reported her missing, though her mother says the mother knows where that girl is. The mother has led the police on a couple wild goose chases now, and told some lies, and the young girl is still missing from the grandmother's world. Neighbors and friends have not seen this young girl for about five weeks.

I fear for that little girl, Caylee, but I like to imagine the mother actually did something like place the girl for adoption. The father died a year ago, and the mother has had to depend on the grandmother to help take care of the child. It sounds like the grandmother was maybe a bit overbearing, though she seems rather nice--it's just that if I were in that mother's position, I suspect things were maybe a bit more than she could bear. In my idealistic world, I want to think the mother wanted to place the girl for adoption but the grandmother wouldn't allow that--so she felt she needed to leave the family home, go place the girl, then not admit to the placement to her mother or anyone else.

In this situation, the mother would have done nothing illegal except lie to the police--and, in this kind of situation, it would seem that she has some emotional and mental issues that would provide mitigating circumstances should a charge such as "obstruction of justice" be placed when no child can ever be found. There is no requirement that a mother tell anyone where her child might be. There is no legal requirement saying that a mother must tell anyone that a child has been placed for adoption. There is nothing to say that the mother had any legal requirement to publicize the location of her child.

However, I fear for this girl. The police cadaver dog alerted to a dead body in the mother's car. And that scares me. Very much. I pray for this family and the girl, and only God can make sense of it all.

I had to confirm to a good customer and wonderful friend that I would not be working with him in a few months. It is very hard to know that your work is good, that you've been instrumental in developing a friendship that makes you feel good, and that as a result of your friendship and integrity, there's been a financial reward. This particular customer could have been a small account, and I would have worked my butt off for the gentleman. He is good and kind and smart in both business and one-on-one friendships.

And he sounds like he's not too happy with the new ideas and thoughts of going forward with the new company. I'm doing my best to let him know that things are supposed to continue as they were...but it's very difficult. I had the oppportunity to relocate, and I could have even applied for a couple openings that would allow me to stay on, but I don't know if I want to work for such a large company that de-personalizes things. It is so large, though, that it almost has to if it wants to operate with any kind of efficiency. I just hope all the relationships we've built over the years are not somehow irrevocably severed due to it all. These are good friends as well as business, and I hope all that we've dealt with know that we want only the best for them.

It's a difficult situation, but I hope we will continue to keep in contact.

Things are not great. I am trying very hard to remain positive, but it's very difficult. I worked all week, and attended classes two hours each night in preparation for being jobless at the end of October. Those classes are at the state employment office's associates that help us determine our skills and aptitudes. After being tested all week, the results were in--and they weren't good. Apparently, the only jobs that matched both my interests and my aptitudes require at lease a Masters degree. Not one of them required less than a bachelors' degree, and those that didn't require a bachelors were for specific careers like social worker--not my degree, and not one the state will fund education moneys for. Because my current job is very unique to the industry, I doubt that I will find another job that will pay as well in this area and using my job skill set. None of this is good news.

I then worked all weekend at the respite job that pays about $4 an hour...and I have to pay all the self-employment tax type things. It's not good.

Then I get home and my daughter informs me she had a meeting on Friday with her employer--and the job she thought was going so well isn't apparently as good as she thought. They told her they weren't sure they hired the right person because she didn't look professional and often looked disinterested in her job--and she needs to be able to reorganize her time as necessary. They told her she needed to dress according to the dress policy, and she looked that over--the only thing that really was not being followed was that she wore a tee shirt in the office once in a while. Otherwise, she followed the guidelines, so she's not sure how to fix that except that she went out and bought some new clothes--borrowing money to do so--but she's still not sure this will do the trick. As for looking disinterested, she's not sure how she's supposed to change that. I told her that as far as looking disinterested, she could ask her co-workers to remind her to smile or something if she looks bored. But her actual work, they had no problems with. Still, she thinks it's just a preparation type of warning to getting fired when her 90-day review comes up. I told her just to do her best, and that's all she could do. I'm not sure what else to tell her.

And I can't seem to get my money situation sorted out. It just keeps getting worse and worse. And tonight everyone else seemed to have similar problems. So, what do we do? I'm looking into maybe finding a cheaper place to live...but I don't know if that's possible.

I just want things to get better. It seems to me that if you are working your hardest and doing your best, life should be easier....

I must be rather naive. I received a comment that advised me that the story I related in my last story failed to relate that the participants were all black. To be up front, none of the stories I read or heard on the attack mentioned race. I looked again tonight at some of the stories, and none mentioned race. Is the absence of this fact important.

As my advisor thinks, race will become important in the defense of the group of people that attacked the girl and her father. Somehow, the race of the attackers will be used to mitigate the horrific aspects of the attack, or at least, the defense will attempt to use race for that purpose. So, why isn't it mentioned in any of the news stories?

And, again, as I blogged earlier, why is the "victim" identified as the father with little notice of the girl that was, at minimum, groped in public? Four different media reported the story, and not one mentioned race, and all emphasized the father's actions and injuries without acknowledging any kind of recognized harm to the girl. The reader of the four stories by four different reporters and advancing through at least four different editors would think that there would be four different perspectives. Yet, all reported the same actions in the same manner with the same elements being emphasized.

I think this is educated gatekeeping. I think it is popular in new media these days to emphasize crime, generally, in neighborhoods. It is not popular to acknowledge race or females as victims. If it had been a white, straight 12-year old that had been "groped," for wont of a better word, and the mother had attempted to defend her child, then the story would probably have exploded that a mother was injured in the defense of her son, who will forever be traumatized by such an event. It's not unusual for mothers to defend their sons, and it's not even unusual for a mother to defend a guilty child. But if this had been a mother defending her daughter, resulting in two female victims at the hand of a group of young men, then we would never have heard about it--as long as the mother lived. But, because an adult male was injured by a mob of teenaged males, THAT made the news. Race would have been mentioned, I'm sure, if it had been a black man attacked by a group of white males.

I think our media have been educated to emphasize only sensational news and not report the kind of news that lets us know what is happening every day, and for some reason, we're all surprised when the next time a similar event happens to ourselves. When will the next man be beat up for taking care of his daughter? And will it make news? Probably not....

Today I heard a news story several times, and in the last report the conclusion was: "The victim is recovering at home." I have to ask: Who is the victim?

Apparently, a father and his 12-year-old daughter were leaving an amusement park just before midnight when a male grabbed the daughter in a sexually-suggestive manner. The father took offense and tried to stop the male, and the father was attacked by the attacker and knocked to the ground. The attacker then called some friends, and seven of his friends came to his aid in further assault on the father, attacking him with a softball sized rock, bashing in his head and effectively stopping him from defending his daughter--who, though the story was different in each report, was either further grabbed in sexually-explicit manners to being dragged away and molested in worst ways. Seven of the attackers were immediately arrested, and an eighth ran from the scene. Some reports say he was caught; others say they're still looking for him. The stories all emphasized the father's courageous actions and subsequent beating. And, as already stated, the last report I heard was that "the victim is recovering at home."

So, who is that victim? Is it the man that suffered a beating, getting his head bashed in, and being forced to watch his daughter being assaulted without being able to help her? Or is it the daughter? I think the reporter was referring to the father, and very little was said about the daughter's condition.

I understand that this entire situation was horrible, and that the father was badly hurt. I understand that he could have died without being able to help his daughter. But what about the daughter? Is she not a victim?

I don't think the reporter meant to diminish the girl's victimization. I think the reporter wanted to emphasize how even in the face of an older man defending his daughter, these young males were brazen enough to attempt to demonstrate that THEY ruled the streets and that THEY had control of every human that walked the streets. I think it was an attempt by the news media to incite outrage over this man's beating. The daughter's situation was largely ignored.

And in this light, I should no longer wonder why molestations of young women are not always reported. When a true victim is ignored in light of the heroic actions of the rescuer, why would a victim that had no such knight stand to proclaim her outrage? If such a publicized crime is publicly decried as an outrageous action of young people with little regard for a female that is clearly a victim, what can we expect from a situation where a single attacker assaults a single victim with no witnesses?

We should all be outraged by the attackers' actions, and we should all pray that God gives this young woman and her father courage to stand and proclaim their rights to live a life free from fear. Fear from other humans is nothing we should ever have to feel, and it is only through human behavior that such fear is fostered. We need to encourage every person to eliminate such fear or the threat of such fear from their life, though I fear it is impossible. Let us each look for good things, encourage young people to respect other people, and pray that God gives each of us strength to address fear in a way that would honor our faith in God and ourselves.