...hand out the death penalty to these animals, and post the news on every single web page imaginable, including facebook etc. THEN we'll get somewhere in this shit-hole society. Till the courts get serious with scum like this, all bets are off.

How can bleeding heart liberals argue with that? And please don't respond.

******

I'll respond anyway. The threat of the death penalty is totally ineffective among a population that doesn't expect to live much past 25 anyway. The life expectancy of young men in places like Richmond is very low. They see their brothers, cousins, innocent bystanders and fellow gangbangers, gunned down every week. Trying to scare them with the death penalty is as ludicrous as the idea of the death penalty being a deterrent for drug kingpins, who have much more cause to be worried about the more immediate threat of being killed by their rivals than they are by the State.

Unfortunately, too many young men in our society believe their lives are worthless -- in part because of the societal attitudes that have people like the posters on this forum calling them "animals" and "scum." If life isn't worth anything, then what do they care what happens to them, or to the people around them? If you don't have anything, you have nothing to lose.

I didn't mean that to sound like an excuse, just an explanation of why there aren't any simple solutions.

I find this incident sickening. I hope they're all -- including all the bystanders -- caught and have the book thrown at them, and that the community rises up and repudiates both this specific incident and the endemic violence that's plagued Richmond for decades.

I agree with those who say this isn't about the rape anymore. If LW has thought about this every day for 20 years, it's become, among other things, a habit. Thinking about the rape has become a way for him to displace all the anger, frustration, etc. of his daily life. Instead of dealing with the people who are making him angry and frustrated now (including, apparently his wife and those current behaviors he's not crazy about), he's blaming all those feelings on an incident so far in the past that he can justify not doing anything about his feelings.

If he can't tell his therapist about the rape, that tells me that he holds the fairly common belief that anger and all the other negative emotions are shameful, and thus he is motivated to displace those feelings from the present to a time and place where they were justifiable: I'm angry; I can't be angry at my wife (or my kids or my boss), that would make me a bad person; I must be angry about the rape; being angry about rape makes me a good person.

I also agree with the comment who said "There is something really disturbing about a man who has been married to a woman for 20 years and out of 20 years of knowing her obsesses about one snapshot of her life which happens to be her sexual violation." That's horrible. That's making her a victim all over again every day.

Stop it.

Just stop it! Stop taking those thoughts and turning them over and over in your mind. As I said, it's become a habit, maybe even a ritual. Every time you start to think about it, redirect your thoughts to something else. The only place you should examine these feelings is therapy, where I suggest you take this posthaste. If you can't bring yourself to look your therapist in the face as you talk about it, then show him/her this letter to break the ice.

Condolences on the loss of your mother -- she sounds like a terrific lady.

That reminds me of a conversation I had with a flight attendant on a recent flight. I like to stretch my legs and I'd been in transit for almost 36 hours, so I headed back to the lavatory, stopped to hang out in the galley (I know, a no-no) and struck up a conversation with the flight attendant who appeared to be about my age (50ish). I asked her about how and when she became a flight attendant, and noted that uh, more mature, flight attendants seem to be the norm these days. She said at her graduation from flight attendant training the head of the airline told everyone to stand up, and then told them to sit down if they were over a certain age, a certain weight, if they had children, etc. When he was done, only a few of them were standing. He said 40 years ago only those people would have been flight attendants. Now, talking to older female flight attendants I get the impression that the airlines actually prefer older women: more reliable, more mature, fewer issues with child care and scheduling, etc. How times have changed!