"Y'know what we should do?" she asked in the kind of earnest, ardent voice a young wife might have used some 45 years ago to suggest to her young husband that they join the Peace Corps and save the world.
"N'uh uh. What?"
"We should start a hotline for people who want to kill people."
Yeee-owww! First, we ain't young. Second, and more to the point, you might ask What in the holy hell was she talking about?
We'd just seen "Milk." The movie's climax, the assassination of Harvey Milk by a lunatic ex-cop, had reduced both of us to tears. The Loved One doesn't take teary movies lying down. Every time we've walked out of a movie theater dabbing our eyes and blowing our noses, she's spent the rest of the evening and, often, much of the next day laying out an elaborate program to rectify whatever wrong has been portrayed. After we saw "A Beautiful Mind," she pretty much rebuilt the nation's mental health care system.
Like anybody else with a shred of human decency, she felt deeply for the plight of Harvey Milk. Yet my alluring consort had room in her heart for Milk's shooter, Dan White. While I felt a certain vengeful pleasure knowing that White had spent the last years of his life in the self-constructed hell that resulted in his suicide, The Loved One actually viewed him as a person.
"We have suicide hotlines," she said. "We have drug-user hotlines and bulimic hotlines. Why can't we have a hotline for people who are so mad that they want to kill?"
"I think you've got something there," I said.
"Yeah. Not everybody who kills somebody wants to do it. Maybe if someone was there just to listen and help them get through the moment...."
Would a comforting and understanding voice have helped Dan White get through his moment of rage in November 1978? How about Mark David Chapman or even the brute who snuffed out Jennifer Hudson's mother, brother, and nephew?
We normally see murder as some sort of inexorable event, perpetrated by people who are evil or psychotic. Can it be that many murders are committed by individuals who otherwise might have lived reasonably unremarkable lives? I'm not talking about Richard Speck or Timothy McVeigh, men who were as destined to take lives as I am to take that extra slice of pizza.
I've heard the old saw that any of us is capable of murder. I'd like to be able to tell you a story wherein I was about to fire a gun at some poor soul until I came to my senses but I can't. I've never even fantasized for a minute taking another person's life, although I've given three or four chuckleheads some pretty sound imaginary beatings over the years. I can't imagine Ellen Page or Yo-Yo Ma or even Benny Jay having to restrain themselves from cutting a man's throat. On the other hand, I have a passel of ex-wives and girlfriends who surely must have envisioned pushing me off a tall building now and again.
And that's just my point. Or, more accurately, The Loved One's. Maybe, just maybe, circumstance and rage can bring a normally law-abiding citizen to the brink of a capital crime. Shouldn't there be some safety net for them, some voice of sanity at the other end of the line?
It took The Loved One to think of it. That's one of the things I cherish about her. She truly believes there are solutions for some of humanity's most intractable problems. If only we were 30 years younger; we could join the Peace Corps and try to save the world.
