It's a modern trend that we are asked to give our opinion on the news - email us! visit the website! vote for your villains and heroes! - but sometimes people forget that the individuals in the news are real, often people who have never asked to be famous and by the misfortune of a tragedy are suddenly up for public consumption, an interpretation - denigration - of character by those who have never known them except for a few lines in a newspaper.  

[ed. I think in 2011 this would be calling: Trolling]

 

A Girl Like Faith

 

This is not a collective, James, this is an individual.

This is not a statistic, but the story of a real person.

Yours is not a bar room rant – far away from home –

it is a post on the site of a local newspaper,

an incursion into private grief. Local grief.

 

Faith was quite the opposite of the girl

you imagine, the statistics you quote:

no tearaway teenager, no disrespect here.

There is no end to the pride you would feel

having brought up a girl like Faith;

this is not a cliché, no collective

outpouring of sorrow, just

a simple statement

of truth. Cars crash.

 

A mother who imbued her daughter

with values, who sacrificed so much

so young, so that her daughter

might stand tall in the world –

that mother is hurting and

will never stop hurting.

Your rant, James – sick

and shameful – paints

a hideous picture

of your soul.

 

This wonderful girl, 17, walked with fortitude

the like of which has long since left your feet

and the spittle of your vitriol will

catch in the wind one day

and burn your skin

for all eternity.

 

Faith Carroll. Born

seventeenth of December nineteen

ninety – died Sunday;

may she find a better place

somewhere away from here.