Collateral Damage

Collateral Damage
by Robert Yoho

One of the most heinous things about the Oklahoma City bombing was Timothy McVeigh's dispassionate explanation of the deaths of those children. Coldly, he referred to them as "collateral damage." And as the vicious thug drew his last earthly breath of poison gas, McVeigh still had few defenders.

Yet this week, our country has learned of another act of barbarism--a crime so starkly vicious and cold-blooded in its execution, that it makes Tim McVeigh look like little more than a rank amateur. Andrea Yates, the Houston woman who drowned her five young children, committed a deplorable act of violence that merits a much harsher penalty than that imposed on McVeigh. And to those of you who do not believe in the death penalty, I can only say one thing: capital punishment was made for people like Timothy McVeigh and Andrea Yates.

It is certainly a despicable and cowardly act for a person to plant a bomb and flee the scene, leaving 168 people to die in the resulting carnage. However, it takes a special breed of animal to deliberately look into the eyes of her five children--to see their shock and horror over the deaths of their siblings--and then to drown them one-by-one in the family bathtub. It was evil personified. The only thing more appalling to me is a father, or a society, who will bend over backward, seeking to somehow excuse those actions. And had the woman been my wife, it is quite likely that the police on the scene would have found it necessary to stop another act of violence upon the person who slaughtered my kids.

There is no shortage of bleeding heart psychiatrists who will attempt to explain away the grisly act committed by Andrea Yates, but these same mental health professionals can find no redeeming qualities in a crazed, anti-government bomber. A person overcome by rage or strong emotion might lash out and kill someone suddenly. Yet this was not an act of passion; this was a mass murder. In a true crime of passion, the murder of the first baby should have brought the woman to her senses. However, the attempts by the oldest child to flee from his own mother and to fight for his own life would certainly snap her out of it.

I believe suicide is a selfish and cowardly act. However, in this case, suicide would have been preferable to the deaths of five innocent children. If the woman could not cope with the stresses of her children, then she could have mercifully committed suicide and left the children with someone who could adequately cope with them. Now they are dead, murdered by an evil butcher. The woman lives on. Gone are the stresses of her pathetic, miserable life. But this woman continues to breathe the air that she cut off from the lungs of her kids.

Many of those in our new and enlightened, no-fault society will think she should suffer no penalty for her crimes. And if she will only apologize, perhaps we can forget the whole incident ever happened. It is also my opinion that the tortured explanations for her ghastly crime sound strikingly similar to those given by women who wish to murder their unborn children. Come to think of it, why should the mother be punished at all? She simply committed five extremely late term abortions. They were just collateral damage of a society that places no value on human life, of any age.

Human beings constantly have this need to understand the actions of mass murderers and serial killers. By understanding the crimes, we think they can be prevented. However, only a tortured and criminal mind could possibly understand the actions of this dirty mother. And anyone who could understand would not be a person I want to know.

However, all of this misses the point. I do not care what the woman's reasons were. I do not care if she feels any remorse over the act. I do not care if she was suffering from postpartum depression. The babies are dead. Andrea Yates is alive. And that situation should be corrected as fast as we can give poor little, misunderstood Andrea a fair trial and fire up the electric chair.