Alone in my home, I am staring at the television screen and shouting. On the local evening news I have unexpectedly encountered video footage, several months old, of myself writhing on an ambulance gurney, bright green shirt open and drenched with blood, skin pale, knee raised, trying desperately and with utter futility to find relief from pain.
On the evening of August 7, 1994, I was one of seven people stabbed and seriously wounded in a coffee bar a few blocks from my house. Any televised recollection of this incident would be upsetting. But the anger that has me shouting tonight is quite specific — and political — in origin: My picture is being shown on the news to illustrate why Connecticut’s legislature plans to lock up more criminals for a longer time. A picture of my body, contorted and bleeding, has become propaganda in the crime war.
I did not plan to write about this assault. But for months now the politics of the nation has in large part been the politics of crime, from last year’s federal crime bill, through the fall elections, to the Contract with America proposals currently awaiting action by the Senate. Among the welter of my reactions to the attack, one feeling is clear: I am unwilling to be a silent poster child in this debate.
The physical and political truths about violence and crime lie in their specificity, so here is what happened: I went out for after-dinner coffee that evening with two friends and New Haven neighbors, Martin and Anna. At 9:45 we arrived at a recently opened coffeehouse on Audubon Street, in a block occupied by an arts high school where Anna teaches, other community arts institutions, a few pleasant shops, and upscale condos. Entering, we said hello to another friend, a former student of Anna’s named Christina, who the day before had started working behind the counter. We sat at a small table near the front of the cafe; about fifteen people were scattered around the room. Just before ten, the owner announced closing time. Martin stood up and walked a few yards to the counter for a final refill.
Suddenly, there was chaos — as if a mortar shell had landed. I looked up, heard Martin call Anna’s name, saw his arm raised and a flash of metal and people leaping away from a thin, bearded man with a ponytail. Tables and chairs toppled. Without thinking, I shouted to Anna, “Get down!” and pulled her to the floor, between our table and the wall. She clung to my shirt, I to her shoulders, and, crouching, we pulled each other toward the door.
What actually happened I was only able to tentatively reconstruct weeks later. Apparently, as Martin headed toward the counter the thin, bearded man, whose name we later learned was Daniel Silva, asked the time from a young man named Richard, who answered and turned to leave.
Without any warning, Silva pulled out a hunting knife with a six-inch blade and stabbed in the lower back a woman leaving with Richard, a medical technician named Kerstin. Then he stabbed Richard, severing an artery in his thigh. Silva was a slight man, but he moved with demonic speed and force around the cafe’s counter. He struck Martin in the thigh and in the arm he raised to protect his face. Our friend Christina had in a moment’s time pushed out the screen in a window and helped the wounded Kerstin through it to safety. Christina was talking on the phone with the police when Silva lunged over the counter and stabbed her in the chest and abdomen. He stabbed Anna in the side as she and I pulled each other along the wall. He stabbed Emily, a graduate student who had been sitting quietly reading a book, in the abdomen as she tried to flee through the cafe’s back door. All of this happened in about the time it has taken you to read this paragraph.
Meanwhile, I had made it out the cafe’s front door onto the brick sidewalk with Anna, neither of us realizing yet that she was wounded. Seeing Martin through the window, I returned inside and we came out together. Somehow we separated, fleeing in opposite directions down the street. I had gone no more than a few steps when I felt a hard punch in my back followed instantly by the unforgettable sensation of skin and muscle tissue parting. Silva had stabbed me about six inches above my waist, just beneath my rib cage. (That single deep stroke cut my diaphragm and sliced my spleen in half.) Without thinking, I clapped my left hand over the wound before the knife was out and its blade caught my hand, leaving a slice across my palm and two fingers.
“Why are you doing this?” I cried out to Silva in the moment after feeling his knife punch in and yank out. As I fell to the street he leaned over my face; I vividly remember the knife’s immense, glittering blade. He directed the point through my shirt into the flesh of my chest, beneath my left shoulder. I remember his brown beard, his clear blue-gray eyes looking directly into mine, the round globe of a street lamp like a halo above his head. Although I was just a few feet from a cafe full of people and although Martin and Anna were only yards away, the street, the city, the world felt utterly empty except for me and this thin, bearded stranger with clear eyes and a bowie knife. The space around us — well-lit, familiar Audubon Street, where for six years I had taken a child to music lessons — seemed literally to have expanded into a vast and dark canyon.
“You killed my mother,” he answered. My own desperate response: “Please don’t.” Silva pulled the knifepoint out of my chest and disappeared. A moment later I saw him flying down the street on a battered, ungainly bicycle, back straight, vest flapping, ponytail flying.
After my assailant had gone, I lay on the sidewalk, hand still over the wound on my back, screaming. Pain ran over me like an express train; it felt as though every muscle in my back was locked and contorted; breathing was excruciating. A security guard appeared across the street from me; I called out to him but he stood there frozen, or so it seemed. (A few minutes later, he would help police chase Silva down.) I shouted to Anna, who was hiding behind a car down the street. Still in shock and unaware of her own injury, she ran for help, eventually collapsing on the stairs of a nearby brownstone, where a prayer group that was meeting upstairs answered her desperate ringing of the doorbell. From where I was lying, I saw a second-floor light in the condo complex across the way. A woman’s head appeared in the window. “Please help me,” I implored. “He’s gone. Please help me.” She shouted back that she had called the police, but she did not come to the street. I was suddenly aware of a blond woman — Kerstin, though I did not know her name then — in a white-and-gray-plaid dress, sitting on the curb. I asked her for help. “I’m sorry, I’ve done all I can,” she muttered. She raised her hand, looking like a medieval icon; it was covered with blood. So was her dress. She sank into a kind of stupor. Up the street I saw a police car’s flashing blue lights, then another’s, then an officer with a concerned face and a crackling radio crouched beside me. I stayed conscious as the medics arrived and loaded me into an ambulance — being filmed for television, as it turns out, though I have no memory of the crew’s presence.
Being a victim is hard to accept, even while lying in a hospital bed with tubes in one’s veins, chest, penis, and abdomen. The spirit rebels against the idea of oneself as fundamentally powerless. So I didn’t think much for the first few days about the meaning of being a victim; I saw no political dimension to my experience.
As I learned in more detail what had happened, I thought, in my jumbled-up, anesthetized state, about my injured friends (although everyone survived, their wounds ranged from quite serious to critical) and about my wounds and surgery. I also thought about my assailant. A few facts about him are worth repeating: Daniel Silva was a self-employed junk dealer and homeowner. He was white. He lived with his mother and several dogs. He had no arrest record. A New Haven police detective hospitalized across the hall from me recalled Silva as a socially marginal neighborhood character. He was not, apparently, a drug user. He had told neighbors of much violence in his family — indeed, not long before August 7 he had shown one neighbor a scar on his thigh he said was from a stab wound.
A week earlier, Silva’s seventy-nine-year-old mother had been hospitalized for diabetes. After a few days, the hospital moved her to a new room; when Silva saw his mother’s empty bed he panicked, but nurses swiftly took him to her new location. Still, something seemed to have snapped. Earlier on the day of the stabbings, police say, Silva released his beloved dogs, set fire to his house, and rode away on his bicycle as the house burned. He arrived on Audubon Street with a single dog on a leash, evidently convinced his mother was dead. (She actually did die a few weeks after Silva was jailed.)
In the moments of greatest threat, there were no Schwarzeneggers, no stand-alone heroes. . . . but neither were there abject victims. Instead, amid the confusion and panic of life-threatening attack, people reached out to one another.
While I lay in the hospital, the big story on CNN was the federal crime bill then being debated in Congress. Even fogged by morphine, I was aware of the irony. I was flat on my back as a result of a particularly violent assault, while Congress was moving toward passing the anticrime package I had editorialized against in the Nation just a few weeks earlier. Night after night in the hospital, unable to sleep, I watched the crime-bill debate replayed and heard Republicans and Democrats (who had sponsored the bill in the first place) fall over each other to prove who could be the toughest on crime.
The bill passed on August 21, a few days after I returned home. In early autumn I actually read the text of the crime bill — all 412 pages. What I found was perhaps obvious, yet under the circumstances compelling: not a single one of the bill’s provisos would have protected me or Anna or Martin or any of the others from our assailant — not the enhanced prison terms, not the forty-four new death-penalty offenses, not the three-strikes-you’re-out requirements, not the summary deportations of criminal aliens. And the new tougher-than-tough anticrime provisions of the Contract with America, such as the proposed abolition of the Fourth Amendment’s search-and-seizure protections, offer no more practical protection.
On the other hand, the mental-health and social-welfare safety nets shredded by Reaganomics and conservatives of both parties might have made a difference in the life of someone like my assailant — and thus in the life of someone like me. My assailant’s growing distress in the days before August 7 had been obvious to his neighbors. He had muttered darkly about relatives planning to burn down his house. A better-funded, more comprehensive safety net just might have saved me and six others from untold pain and trouble.
From my perspective — the perspective of a crime victim — the Contract with America and its conservative Democratic analogues are really blueprints for making the streets even less safe. Want to take away that socialistic income subsidy called welfare? Fine. More people in New Haven and other cities will turn to the violence-breeding economy of crack, or emotionally implode from sheer desperation. Cut funding for those softheaded social workers? Fine. Let more children be beaten without the prospect of outside intervention; let more Daniel Silvas carry their traumatic scars into violent adulthood. Get rid of the few amenities prisoners enjoy, like sports equipment, musical instruments, and the right to get college degrees? Fine. We’ll make sure that those inmates are released to their neighborhoods tormented by unchanneled rage.
One thing I could not properly appreciate in the hospital was how deeply many friends, neighbors, and acquaintances were shaken by the coffeehouse stabbings — let alone strangers who took the time to write. The reaction of most was a combination of decent, horrified empathy and a clear sense that their own presumption of safety had been undermined.
But some people who didn’t bother to acquaint themselves with the facts treated the stabbings as a sort of Rorschach test onto which they projected their own preconceptions about crime, violence, and New Haven. Some present and former Yale students, for instance, were desperate to see in my stabbing evidence of the great dangers of New Haven’s inner city. One student newspaper wrote about “New Haven’s image as a dangerous town fraught with violence.” A student reporter from another Yale paper asked if I didn’t think the attack proved New Haven needs better police protection. Given the random nature of this assault — it could as easily have happened in wealthy, suburban Greenwich, where a friend of mine was held up at an ATM at the point of an assault rifle — it’s tempting to dismiss such sentiments as the products of an insular urban campus. But city hating is central to today’s political culture. Newt Gingrich excoriates cities as hopelessly pestilential, crime-ridden, and corrupt. Fear of urban crime and of the dark-skinned people who live in cities is the Right’s basic text, and defunding cities is a central agenda item for the new Congressional majority.
Yet it was, in no small measure, the institutions of an urban community that saved my life last August 7. That concerned police officer who found me and Kerstin on the street was joined in a moment by enough emergency workers to handle the carnage in and around the coffeehouse, and his backups arrived quickly enough to chase down my assailant. In minutes I was taken to Yale-New Haven Hospital less than a mile away — built in part with the public funding so hated by the Right. As I was wheeled into the emergency room, several dozen doctors and nurses descended to handle all the wounded.
By then my abdomen had swelled from internal bleeding. The trauma surgeon told me a few weeks later that I arrived on his operating table as white as a ghost; my prospects, he said, would have been poor had I not been delivered so quickly, and to an emergency room with the kind of trauma team available only at a large metropolitan hospital. In other words, if my stabbing had taken place in the suburbs, I would have bled to death.
“Why didn’t anyone stop him?” That question was even more common than the reflexive city bashing; I can’t begin to guess the number of times I had to answer it. Each time, I repeated that Silva moved too fast, that it was simply too confusing. And, each time, I found the question not just foolish but offensive.
“Why didn’t anyone stop him?” To understand that question is to understand, in some measure, why crime is such a potent political issue. To begin with, the question carries not empathy but an implicit burden of blame; it really asks, “Why didn’t you stop him?” It is asked because no one likes to imagine oneself a victim. It’s far easier to claim for oneself the aggressive power of the attacker, to embrace the delusion of oneself as Arnold Schwarzenegger defeating a multitude single-handedly. If I am tough enough and strong enough, I can take out the bad guys.
The country is at present suffering from a large-scale version of this same delusion. This myth is buried deep in the political culture, nurtured in history’s tales of frontier violence and vigilantism, and by the action-hero fantasies of film and television. Now, bolstered by the social Darwinists of the Right, who see society as an unfettered marketplace in which the strongest individuals flourish, this delusion frames the crime debate.
I also feel that the question “Why didn’t anyone stop him?” implies only two choices: Rambo-like heroism or abject victimhood. To put it another way, it suggests that the only possible responses to danger are the individual biological imperatives of fight or flight. And people don’t want to think of themselves as on the side of flight. This is a notion whose political moment has arrived. In last year’s debate over the crime bill, conservatives successfully portrayed themselves as those who would stand and fight; liberals were portrayed as ineffectual cowards.
“Why didn’t anyone stop him?” That question and its underlying assumptions see both heroes and victims as lone individuals. But on the receiving end of a violent attack, the fight-or-flight dichotomy didn’t apply. Nor did that radically individualized notion of survival. At the coffeehouse that night, in the moments of greatest threat, there were no Schwarzeneggers, no stand-alone heroes. (In fact, I doubt anyone could have “taken out” Silva; as with most crimes, his attack came too suddenly.) But neither were there abject victims. Instead, amid the confusion and panic of life-threatening attack, people reached out to one another. This sounds simple; yet it suggests there is an inclination toward mutual aid that poses a profound challenge to the atomized individualism of the Right. Christina helped the wounded Kerstin to escape, and Kerstin in turn tried to bring Christina along. Anna and I, and then Martin and I, clung to each other, pulling one another toward the door. And just as Kerstin sought me out on the sidewalk rather than wait for help alone, so Richard and Emily, who had never met before, together sought a hiding place around the corner. Three of us even spoke with Silva either the moment before or the instant after being stabbed. My plea to Silva might or might not have been what kept him from pushing his knife all the way through my chest and into my heart; it’s impossible to know what was going through his mind. But this impulse to communicate, to establish human contact across a gulf of terror and insanity, is deeper and more subtle than the simple formulation of fight or flight, courage or cowardice, would allow.
I have never been in a war, but I now think I understand a little of the intense bond among war veterans who have survived awful carnage. It is not simply the common fact of survival but the way in which the presence of these others seemed to make survival itself possible. There’s evidence, too, that those who try to go it alone suffer more. In her insightful study, Trauma and Recovery, psychiatrist Judith Herman writes about rape victims, Vietnam War veterans, political prisoners, and other survivors of extreme violence. “The capacity to preserve social connection,” she concludes, “. . . even in the face of extremity, seems to protect people to some degree against the later development of post-traumatic syndromes. For example, among survivors of a disaster at sea, the men who had managed to escape by cooperating with others showed relatively little evidence of post-traumatic stress afterward.” On the other hand, she reports that the “highly symptomatic” survivors were “ ‘Rambos,’ men who had plunged into impulsive, isolated action and not affiliated with others.”
The political point here is that the Rambo justice system proposed by the Right is rooted in that dangerous myth of the individual fighting against a hostile world. Recently, that myth got another boost from several Republican-controlled state legislatures, which have made it much easier to carry concealed handguns. But the myth has nothing to do with the reality of violent crime, the ways to prevent it, or the needs of survivors. Had Silva been carrying a handgun instead of a knife on August 7, there would have been a massacre.
The Rambo justice system proposed by the right is rooted in that dangerous myth of the individual fighting against a hostile world. . . . But the myth has nothing to do with the reality of violent crime, the ways to prevent it, or the needs of survivors.
I do understand the rage and frustration behind the crime-victim movement, and I can see how the Right has harnessed it. For weeks I thought obsessively and angrily of those minutes on Audubon Street, when first the security guard and then the woman in the window refused to approach me — as if I, wounded and helpless, were the dangerous one. There was also a subtle shift in my consciousness a few days after the stabbing. Up until that point, the legal process and press attention seemed clearly centered on my injuries and experience, and those of my fellow victims. But once Silva was arraigned and the formal process of prosecution began, it became his case, not mine. I experienced a sense of marginalization, a feeling of helplessness bordering on irrelevance.
Sometimes that got channeled into outrage, fear, and panic. After arraignment, Silva’s bail was set at seven hundred thousand dollars. That sounds high, but just 10 percent of that amount in cash, perhaps obtained through some relative with home equity, would have bought his pretrial release. I was frantic at even this remote prospect of Silva walking the streets; so were the six other victims and our families. We called the prosecutor virtually hourly to request higher bail. Partly because of our complaints and partly because an arson charge was added, the bail was eventually raised — to eight hundred thousand dollars. Silva remains in the Hartford Community Correctional Center awaiting trial.
Near the six-month anniversary of the stabbings, I called the prosecutor and learned that in December Silva’s lawyer filed papers indicating he intends to advance a “mental disease or defect” defense. If successful it would send him to a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane for the equivalent of the most severe criminal penalty. In February the court was still awaiting a report from Silva’s psychiatrist. Then the prosecution will have him examined by its own psychiatrist. “There’s a backlog,” I’ve been told; the case is not likely to come to trial until the end of 1995, at the earliest. Intellectually, I understand that Silva is securely behind bars, that the court system is overburdened, that the delay makes no difference in the long-term outcome. But emotionally, viscerally, the delay is devastating.
Another of my bursts of victim consciousness involved the press. Objectively, I know that many people who took the trouble to express their sympathy to me found out only through news stories. And sensitive reporting can, for the crime victim, be a kind of ratification of the seriousness of an assault, a reflection of the community’s concern. (One reporter for the daily New Haven Register did produce levelheaded and insightful stories about the Audubon Street attack.) But most of the reporting was exploitative, intrusive, and inaccurate. I was only a few hours out of surgery, barely able to speak, when calls from television stations and newspapers started coming to my hospital room. Anna and Martin, sent home to recover, were ambushed by a TV crew as they emerged from their physician’s office, and later rousted from their beds by reporters from another TV station ringing their doorbell. The Register’s editors enraged all seven victims by printing our home addresses (a company policy, for some reason) and running spectacularly distressing full-color photographs of the crime scene, complete with the coffee bar’s bloody windowsill.
Such press coverage inspired in all of us a rage it is impossible to convey. In a study commissioned by the British Broadcasting Standards Council, survivors of violent crimes and disasters “told story after story of the hurt they suffered through the timing of media attention, intrusion into their privacy, and harassment, through inaccuracy, distortion, and distasteful detail in what was reported.” This suffering is not superficial. For the victim of violent crime, the press may reinforce the perception that the world is an uncomprehending and dangerous place.
The very same flawed judgments about “news value” contribute significantly to a public conception of crime that is as completely divorced from the facts as a Schwarzenegger movie. One study a few years ago found that reports on crime and justice constitute approximately 25 percent of newspaper stories, “nearly three times as much attention as [is given] the presidency or the Congress or the state of the economy.” And the most spectacular crimes — the stabbing of seven people in an upscale New Haven coffee bar, for instance — are likely to be the most “newsworthy,” even though they are statistically the least likely. As sociologist Mark Warr writes in a study commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences, “The image of crime presented in the media is thus a reverse image of reality.”
Media coverage also brings us to another crucial political moral: the “seriousness” of crime is a matter of race and real estate. This has been pointed out before, but it can’t be repeated too often. Seven people stabbed in a relatively affluent, mostly white neighborhood near Yale University — this was big news on a slow news night. It went national over the AP wires and international over CNN’s Headline News. It was covered by the New York Times, and words of sympathy came to New Haven from as far away as Prague and Santiago. Because a graduate student and a professor were among those wounded, the university sent representatives to the emergency room. The morning after, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano walked the neighborhood to reassure merchants and office workers. For more than a month the regional press covered every new turn in the case.
Horrendous as it was, though, no one was killed. But, four weeks later, a fifteen-year-old girl named Rashawnda was riding in a car with two friends about a mile from Audubon Street; as their car turned a corner, she was shot and killed. Apparently her assailants mistook her for someone else. Rashawnda was black and her shooting took place in the Hill, the New Haven neighborhood with the highest poverty rate. No Yale officials showed up at the hospital to comfort Rashawnda’s mother or cut through red tape. The New York Times did not come calling; there were certainly no bulletins flashed around the world on CNN. The local news coverage lasted just long enough for Rashawnda to be buried.
Anyone trying to deal with the reality of crime, as opposed to the fantasies peddled to win elections, needs to understand the complex suffering of those who are survivors of traumatic crimes, and the suffering and turmoil of their families. I have impressive physical scars: There is a broad purple line from my breastbone to the top of my pubic bone, an X-shaped cut on my side where the chest tube entered, a thick pink mark on my chest where the point of Silva’s knife rested on a rib. On my back is the unevenly curving horizontal scar where Silva thrust the knife in and yanked it out, leaving what looks like a crooked smile. But the disruption of my psyche is, day in and day out, more noticeable. For weeks after leaving the hospital I awoke nightly, agitated and drenched with perspiration. For two months I was unable to write — my brain simply refused to concentrate. Into any moment of mental repose would rush images from the night of August 7; or, alternately, my mind would simply not tune in at all. My reactions remain out of balance and disproportionate: I shut a door on my finger recently, not too hard, and my body was suddenly flooded with adrenalin and I nearly fainted. Walking on the arm of my partner, Margaret, one evening I abruptly shoved her to the side of the road; I had seen a tall, lean shadow on the block where we were headed and was alarmed out of all proportion. I get into arguments now and find myself quaking with rage for an hour afterward, completely unable to restore calm. Though to all appearances normal, I feel at a long arm’s remove from the familiar sources of pleasure, comfort, and anger that shaped my daily life before August 7.
What psychologists call post-traumatic stress disorder is, among other things, a profoundly political state in which the world has gone wrong, in which one feels isolated from the broader community by the inarticulable extremity of one’s experience. I have spent a lot of time in the past few months thinking about what the world must look like to those who have survived repeated violent attacks — whether children battered in their homes or prisoners beaten or tortured behind bars — as well as those, such as rape victims, whose assaults are rarely granted public ratification.
The Right owes much of its success to the anger of crime victims and the argument that government should do more for them. This appeal is epitomized by the rise of restitution laws — statutes requiring offenders to compensate their targets. On February 7 the House of Representatives passed, by a vote of 431 to 0, the Victim Restitution Act, a plank of the Contract with America that will supposedly send back to jail offenders who don’t make good on their debts to their victims. Here in Connecticut, Governor Rowland recently proposed a restitution amendment to the state constitution.
On the surface, it is hard to argue with the principle of reasonable restitution — particularly since it implies community recognition of the victim’s suffering. But I wonder if these laws will really end up benefiting someone like me — or if they are just empty, vote-getting devices that exploit victims and could actually hurt our chances of getting speedy, substantive justice. H. Scott Wallace, former counsel to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice, writes in Legal Times that the Victim Restitution Act is “unlikely to put a single dollar into crime victims’ pockets, would tie up the federal courts with waves of new damages actions, and would promote unconstitutional debtors’ prisons.”
I also worry that the rhetoric of restitution — like so much of the imprisonment-and-execution mania dominating the political landscape — confuses the goals of justice and revenge. Revenge, after all, is just another version of the take-out-the-bad-guys myth. Judith Herman believes indulging fantasies of revenge actually worsens the psychic suffering of trauma survivors: “The desire for revenge . . . arises out of the victim’s experience of complete helplessness,” and forever ties the victim’s fate to the perpetrator’s. Real recovery from the cataclysmic isolation of trauma is possible only when “the survivor comes to understand the issues of principle that transcend her personal grievance against the perpetrator . . . [a] principle of social justice that connects the fate of others to her own.” In the wake of the Long Island Rail Road massacre, the survivors and victims’ families have banded together, not to urge that Colin Ferguson be executed, but to work for gun control.
What it all comes down to is this: What do survivors of violent crime really need? What does it mean to create a safe society? Do we need courts so overburdened by nonviolent drug offenders that Daniel Silvas go untried for eighteen months — delays that leave victims and suspects alike in limbo? Do we need to lock nonviolent drug offenders into mandatory-sentence proximity with violent sociopaths and career criminals? Do we need the illusory bravado of a Schwarzenegger film — or the real political courage of those LIRR survivors?
If the use of my picture on television unexpectedly brought me face to face with the memory of August 7, some part of the attack is relived for me daily as I watch the gruesome, voyeuristically reported details of the stabbing deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. It was relived even more vividly by the televised trial of Colin Ferguson. (One night, after watching Ferguson on the evening news, I dreamed that I was on the witness stand and Silva, like Ferguson, was representing himself and was questioning me.) Throughout the trial, as Ferguson spoke of falling asleep and having someone else fire his gun, I heard neither cowardly denial nor what his first lawyer called “black rage”; I heard Daniel Silva’s calm, secure voice telling me I killed his mother. And when I hear testimony by the survivors of that massacre — which occurred on a train as comfortable and familiar to them as my neighborhood coffee bar was to me — I feel a great and incommunicable fellowship.
But the public obsession with these trials, I am convinced, has no more to do with the real experience of crime victims than does the anticrime posturing of politicians. I do not know what made my assailant act as he did. Nor do I think that crime and violence can be reduced to simple political categories. But I do know that the answers will not be found in social Darwinism and atomized individualism, in racism, in dismantling cities and increasing the destitution of the poor. To the contrary: every fragment of my experience suggests that the best protections from crime and the best aid to victims are the very social institutions most derided by the Right. What I want, as crime victim and citizen, is the reality of a safe community — not a politician’s fantasy land of restitution and revenge. That is my testimony.
This essay previously appeared in the Nation, where Shapiro is an associate editor.
— Ed.
