The Worst and the Best in Hope

Today I read an news article about a horrifying story that took place in California. There was a young girl, kidnapped eighteen years ago and turned into a sex slave by two depraved monsters. These monsters looked like people, having all the necessary parts, except for the small exception of a conscience. Her parents, long fearing that she had died, were grateful to find out that their little girl was in fact alive, even though she had been through a hell that even the Devil would have a difficult time devising.
Being a human being, and even though I am a man, I do possess some semblance of emotion, even though some women might disagree with that statement. The revelation of what had occurred shocked even my jaded self, and I do truly wish with all my heart that a special place in the Devil's den be reserved for the two (a husband and wife team). Preferably next to Hitler and his daily pineapple anal probe. While I don't normally comment on such base news items, this particular one pushed me to speak.
One thought that crossed my mind that in a way, I was grateful for the revelation. Her parents now know what happened to their long lost child, and even more so don't just have a muddy inappropriate grave site to visit but a warm and living person who then can reconnect to. Even in the depths of evil that were done to this poor woman, there is the small parcel of good that she survived her ordeal and a broken family can be reunited.
Her stepfather, long a suspect in the kidnapping case, said it best. To him, her discovery and return was better than winning the lottery. For someone who has neither children or a winning lottery ticket, I can only guess on the supreme power of such a feeling, but I can understand the gravity of it without experiencing it.
I cannot understand, on the other hand, the monsters who perpetrated the acts on the young girl. Even with the gift of new life that she was given (the monsters had impregnated her twice), a blessing that must stand out in the viciousness of what had occurred, the mentality of what was done confounds me. Keeping a person prisoner for nearly two decades as a personal sex slave is beyond anything that I can comprehend. Now, of course, our great psychological minds will try to understand the hows and whys, but I have long realized that some things go beyond reason, and psychologists by definition know little about humanity. They attempt to boil it down to scientifically verifiable things, when as humans (and supposedly monsters as well) we don't just live in a logical world.
Hope is one such thing that defies logical. To be true, I have often followed the purely logical approach when it comes to long term missing persons. I have often stated that Jodie Huisentruit, the most famous missing person case in my area of the country, is long dead and decomposed. It is a cold and harsh logical truth. But for those who know her personally, and love and care about her, this logic holds no sway. I wish for once that logical would fail me, and that we find her, alive and well one day. This finding of the missing girl in California should give hope to any who have lost someone, even as illogical as such hope is. Someone once said that the difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible. It has to be logical.
So, mixed in with the evilness of the world, a good returned out of it. The illogical and impossible occurred. Hope springs anew and someones dreams did come true. Not to lessen the importance of these events that I have described, I am going to take some life lessons from this. Call me J.D. if you so desire, but it is the events and people around us mixed in with our hearts and minds that make us who we are. I sit here and wonder what her parents did for eighteen years. Certainly they cried and felt the bottomless pits of despair, but at some point they tried to move on in their lives. When this occurred was certainly after many around them told them to move on, to let go of hope and live normal life. This is a cruelty that we all have done to another and have experienced ourselves, albeit for less traumatic experiences as losing a child. Even when we have "moved on" from such hurts, a part of us still remains in the past. We all know this, often in the visage of our first true love (except for those lucky bastards who spend the rest of the lives with that person). The pain remains, and even with the passage of time we can forget about it for a few moments. Then, something happens, and that part reminds us that we carry it. But, along with that pain and suffering there is another side, hoping for a resolution for it. Most of us never get that. We find another to love, we get another opportunity that better suits us, or those lost people remain lost, draped in the fog of nothingness that the past truly is. We aren't truly people if we can forget these past hurts, and this hope of resolution is what makes the burdens of life able to be borne.
As I said, I have never lost or had a child, but I know something about pain. I have to believe that we deal with it similarly. A parent who loses a child must have the flash each time the door bell rings that it will be their child, returned. A husband whose wife has died dreams of seeing her again in the afterlife. A broken hearted woman wishes that with each phone call her old flame will realize just how much she loved him, and that he feels the same. The lesson I pull from all of this is, keep that hope alive, even if it is found by others to be silly or uncalled for. But it should be appropriate. Don't let either your pain or your hope prevent you from the rest of your life. Just let the both of them exist, and if you find yourself to be the true winner of life's lottery, thank God for each and everyday that you have had.
That being said, perhaps I am full of myself, and know little about what I am talking about. Honestly the thought has crossed my mind often. For what its worth, I am glad that someones hope was answered. It gives each of us another reason to dream, and that is a gift, no matter what anyone else says.