We Permitted It. Now We're Protecting It.

This morning, I had to register a vehicle at the local BMV office, so I didn't have time to enjoy my coffee on the patio as I normally do. I did enjoy the sunny sky as I drove through our neighborhood, seeing hay ready to dry and some crops popping through. As I drove, I thought about the rabbit hole I had allowed myself to fall into with the recent social media and television discussion surrounding the Mackenzie Shirilla murder case.

I made the mistake of either clicking or lingering too long on a post, and my feed almost instantly filled with content about the crash from nearly two years ago, fueled now by a recent Netflix documentary. Legitimate podcasters, casual commentators, and self-appointed internet experts are all weighing in. Some are scrolling through more than 30,000 pages of text messages, offering detailed opinions on relationships and events. It is a lot to absorb.

As I watched the discussion unfold, two things struck me.

The first is the normalization of things that are not normal, things that do not fit the Midwest goodness most of us expect from this part of the country. The case has pulled back the curtain on a pattern of behavior that should have raised alarms long before that July morning. Marijuana use among teenagers, cohabitation between minors and young adults, plans to use psychedelic mushrooms, parents choosing friendship over accountability, a quiet absence of boundaries. All of it treated as unremarkable. All of it nodded past.

The second is the whitewashing of the victims' lives. The two young men who died did not deserve their deaths. That is not in question. But their deaths do not erase their histories. One of the victims appears to have been dealing both marijuana and mushrooms to teenagers, activity described in coverage as "crypto trading." There is video evidence of breaking and entering, shared around as teenagers just having fun. When anyone attempts to discuss these realities, they are quickly labeled as victim blamers and shouted down. Friends who refused to speak with police became remarkably forthcoming once documentary cameras arrived, offering accounts that do not always square with what unbiased observers can plainly see.

Here is what strikes me about those two observations: they are not separate problems. They are the same problem at different points on the timeline. We normalized the behavior while it was happening. Nobody stopped it. Nobody named it. Then tragedy struck, and we are doing the same thing again, only in the opposite direction. First, we looked away. Now we are repainting.

Last week I wrote about a young man taken way too soon. A young man with promise, with goals, with nothing to hide. I celebrated the truth of his life because that is what he deserved. This week I am writing about the same obligation from the opposite direction. When the truth is good, we tell it gladly. When the truth is complicated, we bury it, rename it, and attack anyone who tries to dig it up. The standard should not change based on what the truth turns out to be.

I've watched this pattern before. Not on a screen. People who knew the truth sat with it quietly, out of respect for the living. I understood the silence. I never stopped thinking about what it cost.

Calling out the full truth of a person's life is not victim blaming. It is not cruelty. It is the only honest accounting available to us. A truthful picture includes the parts that are hard to look at. That is not an attack on someone's memory. It is a refusal to trade reality for comfort.

Comfort carries a cost. When we permit bad behavior we send a signal that it is acceptable. When tragedy strikes and we then protect the reputations of those involved, we send that signal again. Same instinct, different moment, same failure.

The next family is already out there somewhere. Living inside the same patterns. Surrounded by the same silence. Waiting for someone to say something.

We permitted it. We are protecting it. And somewhere right now, we are permitting it again.