Monday, June 27, 2011

break my ♥

I recently had the privilege of hearing Hillsong United live.  They sang a song that contains this line:
Break my heart for what breaks yours. . . 

A few weeks back I completed reading Let the Great World Spin.  I won't give a detailed book report, but one of the main story lines was about an Irish man who'd taken a Catholic vow of  service.  He moved to NYC in the early 1970s, lived in a project, and opened his home to prostitutes.  He let them use his bathroom for what bathrooms were created for {ie toilet facilities}.  He befriended these [working girls] and developed strong relationships, trying to [be Jesus to them] even though heroin kept them from cleaning up their act.  Again, the book's setting was NYC in the 70s, during the height of Vietnam and drug abuse.  Culturally, this is what was happening.  It didn't seem one iota like the world I'm living in.  But maybe, it's not really that different.

Culturally, Lexington {my city} is currently billed as "a great place to raise kids", a "well educated" community with many residents holding graduate degrees.  We don't exactly promote our street walkers, drug users and young mothers who work as prostitutes.  Yet, maybe we're not so different?  


Back to the song I mentioned at the beginning of this entry - I can't stop comparing it to a current news story in Lexington.  A man's on trial for hitting a policeman with his vehicle and killing him.  I am not going to go into whether I think he's guilty, innocent, etc.   But reading something in the newspaper Thursday morning really got to me.  The defense tried to argue that a woman [White], not the man on trial, was actually driving the vehicle.   Here's an excerpt:

"Did you consider yourself a crack addict?" Larson [prosecutor] asked.
"I was a crack whore. I know what I was," White replied.
White, 25, now pregnant with her fourth child, said she has been trying to get clean for the last year.
"The past three months is the longest I've been clean this whole entire time," she said.
This young woman, 25 years old and pregnant with her {fourth!!!} child, admitted on the witness stand that she was willing to sleep with men, for money, to purchase crack.  I'm not so naive as to be shocked by this.  But it does cause me grief.  Grief because, my gosh{!}, this is so unnecessary!  Isn't there some other way for her to live?  

White claimed she and the defendant had been to Applebee's together sometime before the accident.  Applebee's!  I have been to every Applebee's in Lexington except for one.  Who knew that in the booth next to my family, as we were enjoying that ridiculous appetizer platter, maybe sat a {crack whore and the man paying her for her services}? 


And that breaks my heart.  I'm sure it breaks God's.  I'm living my {mostly} happy life, while young women are out there, most likely even in my East Loudon Avenue neighborhood {it's not known as the ritzy part of town}, selling themselves for crack cocaine.  It really makes me want to scream.  And figure out how to help them.  


I'd like to track down Ms. White.  Yet I don't know what I'd do if I found her.  Yet. . it breaks my heart that her life has led her to the place where she can publicly label herself a {crack whore}.  What a badge to unproudly wear.

No comments:

Post a Comment