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Saturday, October 06, 2018 11:52:34 PM
Twelve years ago, Amber Wyatt reported her rape.
"A Rape a Minute, a Thousand Corpses a Year: Hate Crimes in America (and Elsewhere)"
Few believed her. Her hometown turned against her. The authorities failed her.
GIF
What do we owe her now?
By Elizabeth Bruenig in Arlington, Tex.
Videos by Gillian Brockell
Updated Sept. 21, 2018
Part One
About that night
Aug. 11, 2006, was a sweltering Friday night in the midst of a long, fatally hot summer. A 16-year-old girl reported that she was raped that night, in a storage shed off a dirt road in my hometown of Arlington, Tex. Nobody was ever prosecuted for it, and nobody was punished except, arguably, her: By the end of the fall semester, she had disappeared from our high school, leaving only sordid rumors and a nascent urban legend.
I never saw her, the rising junior-class cheerleader who said she had been assaulted by two senior boys after a party. I only heard about her. People whispered about her in classrooms and corridors as soon as school started that year. The tension in the school was so thick that the gossip about what had taken place trickled down even to the academic decathletes and debate nerds like me, the kids who could only speculate about what happened at the parties of athletic seniors. I was a 15-year-old rising sophomore, and even I formed a notion of what had happened, or what was said to have happened.
Leaving school one autumn day in 2006, I stood at the top of the concrete stairs at the back exit, with the senior parking lot spread out before me, cars gleaming in the still afternoon sun. Several of them bore a message scrawled in chalk-paint: FAITH. They looked to me like gravestones, brief and cryptic in neat rows.
The next day, people whispered about the word in the halls. It was an acronym, I learned, meaning “f--- Amber in the head,” or “f--- Amber in three holes,” which I awkwardly explained to my parents when they asked me one evening why so many cars around town were thus marked. The idea struck me as brutally, unspeakably ugly, and it was the ugliness that came to mind each time I saw some rear windshield dripping the word in streaky chalk at the local Jack in the Box or Sonic Drive-In. Eventually I heard the girl had recanted her allegations and then had gone away; the writing on the cars, too, went away, and the question of what had happened that night.
And then it was quiet, life was mundane, things resumed: Like an ancient society settling back to rights after a gladiatorial game or ritual sacrifice.
Yet despite the fortune of a happy life, I found it difficult, over the ensuing years, not to think about what had happened that August. I still remembered the taste of summer there, and the pregnant threat of storm clouds, among which flashes of lightning pulsed like veins of silver, and the sense that youth meant collecting inklings of things I couldn’t fully know. One of them was the impression I had gained that year, that vulnerability sometimes begets bloodlust and revulsion, even in seemingly ordinary people. Another was the sense that the damage that follows litters the underside of society, beneath the veneer of peace.
In April 2015, as a young writer, I was granted the rare opportunity to explore this notion. I was working at the New Republic magazine at the time, enjoying the warm auspices of an editor mostly content to let me pursue what I found most interesting. With his blessing, I reached out that spring to the girl whose name had appeared in acronyms and spray-painted slurs, and asked whether she was interested in talking to me about 2006.
Amber Wyatt at her home this summer in San Marcos, Tex. (Amanda Voisard for The Washington Post)
Her name was Amber Wyatt, and she was.
Another sad story. In places clear evidence of sickly, misguided you men.
[...]
One night in September, text and MySpace messages began circulating among Martin teens who wanted to show support for the accused by writing “FAITH” on their cars. The lurid acronym — “f--- Amber in the head” — began appearing on rear windows the following morning, metastasizing as quickly as the rumors had. Even Arthur Aven wrote “FAITH” on his car.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/opinions/arlington-texas/?utm_term=.a151027e2381
Sickly misguided teenagers. Peer pressure. Adults all over the place. That FAITH paints a sad scene.
See also:
FAR RIGHT republican/libertarian groups strongly influenced Boston Bomnber
[...]
One of the brothers suspected of carrying out the Boston bombings was in possession of right-wing American literature in the run-up to the attack, BBC Panorama has learned.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev subscribed to publications espousing white supremacy and government conspiracy theories.
He also had reading material on mass killings.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=90686484
"A Rape a Minute, a Thousand Corpses a Year: Hate Crimes in America (and Elsewhere)"
Few believed her. Her hometown turned against her. The authorities failed her.
GIF
What do we owe her now?
By Elizabeth Bruenig in Arlington, Tex.
Videos by Gillian Brockell
Updated Sept. 21, 2018
Part One
About that night
Aug. 11, 2006, was a sweltering Friday night in the midst of a long, fatally hot summer. A 16-year-old girl reported that she was raped that night, in a storage shed off a dirt road in my hometown of Arlington, Tex. Nobody was ever prosecuted for it, and nobody was punished except, arguably, her: By the end of the fall semester, she had disappeared from our high school, leaving only sordid rumors and a nascent urban legend.
I never saw her, the rising junior-class cheerleader who said she had been assaulted by two senior boys after a party. I only heard about her. People whispered about her in classrooms and corridors as soon as school started that year. The tension in the school was so thick that the gossip about what had taken place trickled down even to the academic decathletes and debate nerds like me, the kids who could only speculate about what happened at the parties of athletic seniors. I was a 15-year-old rising sophomore, and even I formed a notion of what had happened, or what was said to have happened.
Leaving school one autumn day in 2006, I stood at the top of the concrete stairs at the back exit, with the senior parking lot spread out before me, cars gleaming in the still afternoon sun. Several of them bore a message scrawled in chalk-paint: FAITH. They looked to me like gravestones, brief and cryptic in neat rows.
The next day, people whispered about the word in the halls. It was an acronym, I learned, meaning “f--- Amber in the head,” or “f--- Amber in three holes,” which I awkwardly explained to my parents when they asked me one evening why so many cars around town were thus marked. The idea struck me as brutally, unspeakably ugly, and it was the ugliness that came to mind each time I saw some rear windshield dripping the word in streaky chalk at the local Jack in the Box or Sonic Drive-In. Eventually I heard the girl had recanted her allegations and then had gone away; the writing on the cars, too, went away, and the question of what had happened that night.
And then it was quiet, life was mundane, things resumed: Like an ancient society settling back to rights after a gladiatorial game or ritual sacrifice.
Yet despite the fortune of a happy life, I found it difficult, over the ensuing years, not to think about what had happened that August. I still remembered the taste of summer there, and the pregnant threat of storm clouds, among which flashes of lightning pulsed like veins of silver, and the sense that youth meant collecting inklings of things I couldn’t fully know. One of them was the impression I had gained that year, that vulnerability sometimes begets bloodlust and revulsion, even in seemingly ordinary people. Another was the sense that the damage that follows litters the underside of society, beneath the veneer of peace.
In April 2015, as a young writer, I was granted the rare opportunity to explore this notion. I was working at the New Republic magazine at the time, enjoying the warm auspices of an editor mostly content to let me pursue what I found most interesting. With his blessing, I reached out that spring to the girl whose name had appeared in acronyms and spray-painted slurs, and asked whether she was interested in talking to me about 2006.
Amber Wyatt at her home this summer in San Marcos, Tex. (Amanda Voisard for The Washington Post)
Her name was Amber Wyatt, and she was.
Another sad story. In places clear evidence of sickly, misguided you men.
[...]
One night in September, text and MySpace messages began circulating among Martin teens who wanted to show support for the accused by writing “FAITH” on their cars. The lurid acronym — “f--- Amber in the head” — began appearing on rear windows the following morning, metastasizing as quickly as the rumors had. Even Arthur Aven wrote “FAITH” on his car.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/opinions/arlington-texas/?utm_term=.a151027e2381
Sickly misguided teenagers. Peer pressure. Adults all over the place. That FAITH paints a sad scene.
See also:
FAR RIGHT republican/libertarian groups strongly influenced Boston Bomnber
[...]
One of the brothers suspected of carrying out the Boston bombings was in possession of right-wing American literature in the run-up to the attack, BBC Panorama has learned.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev subscribed to publications espousing white supremacy and government conspiracy theories.
He also had reading material on mass killings.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=90686484
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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