Little Cries

It’s a pitch black Saskatchewan winter night. The wind-whipped snow is as brittle as sand, driven by -50 degrees Celsius winds that blast the open field remorselessly. All nature is hunkered down, all nature waits out the tempest... all nature, except for two little girls floundering in the drifts.

Their cries are whipped away by the wind. The agonizing pain they feel as they flounder in the snow is shared by no one; they are entirely alone. The smallest, a 1 year old toddler dressed in only a diaper and t-shirt is too small to do more than scream as tiny children do when terrified and in pain. The older child, a 3 year old, crawls and struggles, utterly lost in the night. She manages to make it a short way. The cold wind cuts like fire as it buffets her tiny body. She wears panties and a T-shirt.

Freezing to death is never a pleasant thing, but at least some of those who do, do so while being surprised by hypothermia ... where their senses leave them and they cast off clothing and walk about, overcome by a sensation of being overheated. They feel no pain.

Not so for the two tiny souls abandoned in a Saskatchewan field. They’ve been plunged, alive and alert, into one of the most hostile environments on the planet. And worse ... even more cruel, is that their sense of abandonment ... their utter and total terror ... their complete sense of security has been stripped from them. They are truly alone ... with neither mother nor father nor kind person to stroke a forehead or hold a little hand. What they endure is torture, in every possible sense of the word.

Eventually, the cries turn to whimpers as burning skin becomes numb and tears turn to icicles. Little toes, hands, noses and ears freeze, but the core remains warm. Being little children, they are armed with that defensive reflex unique to small children, where the inner organs retain heat as long as possible ... little hearts keep beating. Eventually though, it’s not enough and the drifting snow covers two little girls, abandoned by their father, abandoned by their mother, and abandoned by their community.

Later, the father, a 24 year old drunk and petty criminal is charged. After wandering into the field, drunk, and dropping his daughters, he managed to crawl to safety. Despite being drunk, he saved himself.

After the usual legal proceedings he’s sent to an Indian Sentencing Circle, where the case is knocked around by the very community that raised the father. The “circle” recommends no jail time ... that the father work the rest of his life helping elders on the reserve constructing sweat lodges and preparing ceremonial pipes. He has, they say, suffered enough.

The good judge, charged with the case disagrees.

In what has become the perverted method of the liberal legal system, the judge carefully measures his options by putting the guilty father onto the post-modern scales of justice. On the one side of the scale is guilt ... on the other, is what we call victim status. The entire procedure is a matter of elevating the side of the scale called guilt by adding as many “victim” measures to the other side as can be found.

The father’s father was a drunk ... check. The father was a drunk ... check. He was drunk the day he murdered his daughters ... check. Already the guilt side of the scale is rising. The father apparently attended a residential school ... even though he is 24 years old and the old style schools have been closed for decades ... check. The father is a Canadian Indian ... check check check ... and the scale lurches upward. And so it goes, that with every possible victim classification known to “progressive” man adding its counterweight to the scale, the judge, all knowing, sees fit to give the killer 3 years in jail. After all, even the prosecutor suggested that two little lives were worth between 2 and a half and 5 years.

The result is that Indian victim status has been confirmed, in fact, anchored in place. Notions of personal responsibility have been pushed aside, and that vast class of oh-so superior human called the liberal has been made to feel good ... almost smug.

The reality of what it was like for two little girls to freeze to death; what it was like to visit hell on earth, remains unspoken and unexpressed. They have no justice. Their people have abandoned them in an orgy of delusional self pity so common among those who fall into any official victim class. It’s enough to cause those who live life by the rules of personal responsibility to wrench in disgust.

And the legal system ... judge, social workers, defence, and prosecution? They are part of that vast know-it-all class called the post-modern Liberal ... they sleep soundly at night knowing that they’ve managed once again to express nuance ... sophistication ... and have risen above the more pedestrian notions of justice and have recognized that we are not all equal, some being more victim than other. To them, punishment is vulgar and blasé.

And so it is, that two little voices crying out for rescue on a brutally cold Saskatchewan night go unheard. There is nobody ... not one single soul on this planet who will pay for the torture they endured. In what is truly a cruel twist, the self congratulatory and apparently erudite system that has denied them justice has proven itself to be nothing short of depraved as it focuses on “restoring” the torturer, and ignoring the little voices in the night.

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Update ... Pauchay is Out