MOUNT VERNON — (Drags out soapbox.)
Okay, I’m going to set my storyteller hat aside for a moment and offer a little commentary. The Mound View Cemetery in Mount Vernon was vandalized on at least two nights last weekend, as detailed in Grant Ritchey’s Thursday story. Nearly 40 headstones damaged, some severely.
Of course, it’s ignorant and mean of someone or ones to do acts like that. I find the disrespect of history to be repulsive, and to destroy other people’s memories and property shows a sociopathic lack of empathy. Whoever did these acts needs to be caught and pay for their crimes. That is obvious enough.
I would like to see the whole situation be plumbed more deeply, though. Because even more than disgust and anger, I feel disappointment when a situation like this happens. My angle is not a personal one, for I have no family in Mound View Cemetery. But in my function here as a storyteller rescuing tales of bygone days, I have often found myself in that boneyard, finding the final resting places of people involved in countless intriguing and moving stories.
From the unknown early Adena leader buried in the mound, to the later addition of Lenape chieftain Sac-A-Manc, to town founders, to figures like the sideshow performers known as The Wild Men of Borneo, to minstrel legend Daniel Decatur Emmett, to the fallen sheriff James Shellenbarger, countless fascinating stories have their earthly resting points in that cemetery, including those I haven’t yet discovered.
It’s a place I visit for poignant pictures and the closing punctuation for stories.
I’m no fool. I don’t doubt that whoever tore up the old stones couldn’t care less about their stories. And that’s where we must try and figure out if it’s possible to bridge that chasm of disinterest and boredom. It’s more important than it might seem at first glance, because there’s potentially a serious pathology at stake. I wasn’t kidding when I used the word “sociopathic.”
It’s not a term to be used lightly. A sociopath is someone with little regard for how things impact others. A psychopath is an extreme sociopath who has utterly no empathy for others. When psychopaths turn violent, they can become a serious danger to a community.
According to retired FBI profiler Constance DeLong, who hosts the fascinating podcast Killer Psyche, psychopaths are born, sociopaths are made. An essentially normal child can be turned into a sociopath by violence, abuse, addiction, and poverty. If caught early enough, their lives can be repaired to the point that, perhaps, someday they will see the awfulness of being destructive and change their ways.
Psychopaths, on the other hand, have been clinically demonstrated as incurable. They either remain neutral (and there are many non-violent neutral psychopaths in this world), or they escalate. Extreme vandalism is not a good sign, if the perpetrator(s) happen to be far along the psychopathic continuum. It is important that the offender(s) be found, but even more important that they be evaluated. If they have damaged backgrounds, we need to see if we can help them.
If they’re beyond help, we need to know who they are, and where they are, from here on out.
Monuments are a plea to be remembered against the ceaseless grind of time. They are not the person they mark, no more than the remains in the ground are that person now, either. But they stand for the idea of a person. And if someone is unwilling to care for the memory of a long-gone person, then there’s a real danger they won’t care what happens to living people. And that’s a problem.
We are lucky to have such a beautifully kept-up facility, a peaceful perch overlooking the busy town. Let’s hope that the offenders open their eyes and realize that these actions are a stain that they’ll carry for a long time. The only way to wash it away is to see how pathetic vandalism is.
Are you mad at the world? Join the club. There’s a lot that’s wrong with our world right now, but I can tell you one thing: kicking over a tombstone won’t do a damn thing to help it. But people taking the risk to reach out to each other and talk about the problems are the beginning to finding solutions.
And life is really nothing more than an endless game of trying to find solutions. Come help us find a few, and maybe I can tell you a story or two along the way.
