The Whiteness of the Lily

"Children feel the whiteness of the lily with a graphic and passionate clearness which we cannot give them at all. The only thing we can give them is information-the information that if you break the lily in two it won't grow again."

― G. K. Chesterton

************

Dear Kate,

I read in the news yesterday, happened in Hong Kong, that a 12-year-old student was deceived by scammers to ransom his teacher, who was allegedly arrested for buying sex.

There are layers of poignancy in this story, and you will need to peel off just as many cynicism to touch the heart of the matter, the heart that matters.

Why should we know this story, to begin with?  It was told because we want to hear.  Why do we want to hear this, of all the stories that were happening at the same time when the ransom money was wired over to seal innocence's fate?  Why don't we want to hear about the sun rising and flowers blooming?

We want to hear this world is bad and getting worse, and it is the right thing to keep ourselves abreast of the state of its decline so to not go down with it.  Deceivers are "out there," and truth be told that I ain't one of them.  I am a victim who needs to be careful about the victimizers.  I am a vigilante who must expose and put on trial the villains who bring us down.

To tell a story like this is to be a whistleblower, and blow the whistle we do with our phone, over dinner parties, on podium, and behind pulpit.  The most pragmatic moral of the story (and we have many)?  Don't be stupid like this child.  (A very stupid child indeed for growing up in Hong Kong.)

In our city of decay the heart refuses to die, going from sadness to sadness: from the deception conceived and executed to perfection, to how a teacher can conceivably be a sex-buyer in the tender mind of a child, to the final execution of innocence--the crazy, stupid love of a student for his teacher, a child for her mentor, paying the ransom to redeem what can't be, shouldn't be lost.

Anyone who kills the innocence of a child deserves a degree of hellfire.  All of us have at least done it once. 

The child that was us.

Yours, Alex