Monday, June 19, 2023

The Fletcher Case As Metaphor of Leftist Politics

The Fletcher Case As Metaphor Foforr Liberal Politics\\

s gresome and it involves an innocent youg woman who endured something beyond my ab ility to imagine it.  I hope that somehow she was spared the actual experience of it, maybe by some sort of metnal escape mechanism, but I have no idea.  She might have suffered terribly the whole time.  

This is the bizarre case of Lacey Ellen Fletcher who died in her parents' home a couple years ago.  Her mothner called 911 to report that her daughter seemed to hve stopped breathing and the paramedics came.  As soon as the door to the house was opened they encountered a stench that was overwhelming, a stencgh of feces and urine predominantly, but perhaps by then also mingled with the decomposition of Lacey's body wince she had been dead for probably a couple of days by then.  

She was found buried in a hole in a cushion on the leather couch where she had apparently been sitting for many years, twelve years according to most reports.  Crosslegged without moving at all.  Her own extrememtnt had apparently eaten through the leather and gradually she sank into the foam of the couch until she she weighted 86 poundes.  he cause of death was reported as sepsis caused by infections that had bored through her skin even to the bone.

A few months later her parents were charged with second degree murder.  They were reportedly taken apback.  They protested that they had taken good care of Lacey.  The mother said she cleaned he sores.  She must also have fed her although at the time of her death she was starved.

The whole story of Lacey's life is given in many reports.  Diagnosed as a high level autistic, homeschooled from the age of sixteen, last time seen outside the house at the age of twenty one, so long out of public view that many who knew her parents had no kidea they had a child.  She was twenty four when she sat on the couch and never got up again.  She died at the age of thirty six.

I've kept hopeing to see an interrogation of the parents, or a court trial or somehow get more information about their frame of mind but all I've been able to find on You Tube is just a few reported comments.  They insisted that Lacey had chosen to live that way.  It was her choice.  They even accused her of laziness.  They complained about her being such a recluse who didn't want tot do anything with her life.  One report said she was afraid to get off the ouch.  Others speculate that she had a condition of paralysis that made it impossible for her to move.  the parents seem to have regarded her as having consciously chosen her condition.  They weren't happy with it but felt they had no choice but to allow it.  One video reported that they complained that when they had a child they hadn't signed up to be caretakers.   they were unhappy with the situation but it seemsnever to have occurred to them that they had any options but to allow her to remain on the couch and feed her and clean up after her and treat her sores,  all of which was done barely effectively, at least in the last years apparently.

Just those few reported remarks by the parents put this situation in a light that removes it from murder, if indeed they reporesent their true frame of mind.  There seems to have been no malice toward her although plenty of annoyance with her inconvenient choice, her laziness and so on.  They claim to have taken care of her, however ineffectively.  Perhaps it was more effective in the early years.  The problem is there is no way at this time to find out more about it all.  

I end up thinking this is a bizarre case of insanely twisted compassion.  Perhaps a murder or manslaughter charge is the only fair to to deal with it, I don't know, but I keep seeing it as a bizarre sort of insanity rather than murder.   They are said to have consulted with a therapist of some sort twelve years earlier who wanted them to bring her in for examination, but they never did.  Perhaps they couldn't get off the couch, nothing is said about why they didn't.  After that they simply left her on the couch and lived with the horrific results of what they thought of as HER decision, as if they had absolutely no options in the matter at all.  It is hard to fathom their mental state.  Perhaps eventually we'll find out more but so far I haven't seen any more than this.

The house apparently reeked of the stench.  Such an odor would penetrate everything in a closed space, everything porous, all the fureniture, clothing, walls, all of it.  The house was tidey except for the couch.  They lived with that stench year after year.  Someone said it appreats that the mother would sit in a recliner in the same room and watch television, the daughter a few feet away in her crosslegged position onte the couch.  It is beyond any kind of rational explanation.    

When the parents went about their lives didn't people outside notice that they carried this stench on themselves?  CXertainly they must have.  It must have been in their clothing and even in their hair.  Did that ever happen or not and why not?

Could Lacey speak?  Did she actually say she wanted to live as she was doing, never getting off the couch, or was she unable to speak and the parents simply assumed it was her choice?  Was she physically paralzed?  Was she catatonic?  What was going on here?  Wouldn't any mornal parent know that whether the cause was emotional or phyuiscal that lacey was unable to move, rather than consciouslolyy choosing not to move?  Isn't that obvious?  How did they fail to make such an obvious assessment of the situation?  What is going on here?

In either case Lacey needed help to deal with her paralysis or her fear or whatever it was.  She needed outside intervention.  That is obvious to any half sane person just hearing about the story.   Even if it was laziness,k which is about as absurd an idea as I can imagine, you don't let a child's laziness destroy her health and her life and the lives of her parents.  Where on earth was their sense of responsibility and authority?

I know the title I put on this post is rather outrageous and I guess I need to back it up if I can.  Once I decided this isn't a case of malice toward murder but rather a case of insane "compassion" if that's the right word, other similarities came to mind.  The parent who would all a child to eat so mcuh he gained hundreds of pounds and couldn't leave his bedc and had to be lifted out of his room by a forklift.  Every day she fed him a whole array of full meals for one meal, perhaps ten heaping plates of food for one meal.   A kind of "love"  can wecall it that?    The parallel with Lacey is quite a stretch I know, but there's something about the parental mentality that fits nevertheless.  In a way that parent also nmurdered her child.  

I think there are a lot of similar parental attitudes that don't have such dire consequ3ences so pass for normal but are nevertheelss bad for the child and for the parents as well asnd for the whole family.  Let the child stay up late watching tv instead of enforcing bedtime.  Let the child stay up all nigght playing video games and sleeping in the next day until the afternoon.  Yes I know fo such situations.  Somehow the child may grow up more or less intanct.  Perhaps get straightened out somewhere along the way, but it probably also has a hidden effect that prevents the person's reaching a level of success and functioning int he world that would otherwise have been possible.

Cases of "permissiveness" a misguided sort of compassion or love.  Liberalism.  That's how it hit me finally.   Like the mentality that has allowed the tent cities of homeless people to prolivferate in the liberal cities.  Supplying the drug addicts with the drugs they can't otherwise afford, which just contgribute to their inability to become productive memters of society.  Homeless people defectating on tghe sidewalk outside businesses tolerated.  This is the same kind of insanity.  Twisted ideas of compassion.   Rejection of the idea of law and order and authority.  

Letting the supposedly disenfranchised of society loot and destroy businesses, that's another one.  We don't prosecute them.  Even though they destroy the busnesses of people in their same minority status whose incomes are marginal at best even from their businesses.  

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Lacey, of course, as far as can be determined from the scant information available, is completely innocent, simply the victim, so this metaphor can't be taken too far into the craziness of the Left which mismanages not only innocent victims but criminals, turning them into victims and making everybody else their victims in turn.  But still somehow even this extreme bizarre case seems to me to represent even all that kind of craziness, you just have to apply a range of attributes to the target of liberal "compassion."  Destruction of the victim and destruction of society at large is always the result.  Right now we are suffering from the craziness of Wokeness and Transgenderism.  Same basic formula it seems to me.

aybe more later.