Sometimes, you have to stop wading through documents and survivor interview notes and make something you can post beyond a mere article. That’s what this post is: it’s a proof of concept I have for the film I’d like to do on the Hamblin case. I believe that the story should be told from the perspective of survivors and the victims who didn’t live to tell about the abuse. In the Hamblin Victims Statements, John is a polygamist boy who was trafficked to the LDS Church of Satan in Spring City. David Lee Hamblin and his friends allegedly raped, tortured, and murdered John, and even fed his remains to their children at dinner.
I think it’s fitting to let John be the guide for the film. I often reflect on Ecclesiastes 9:5-6 when I work on projects involving deceased victims, and the verses hit me like a sledgehammer.
For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Their love, their hate and their jealousy have long since vanished; never again will they have a part in anything that happens under the sun.
It’s a bleak bit of Scripture, one that drives home the point that when we die, we are dead to this world. There is no portion for us under the sun, and we have but the fleeting moment of a life we are gifted by God to enjoy our love, our happiness, and to realize that our hate and our jealousy will not matter when we are dead, and therefore they should not matter so much while we are live. I went on a bike ride with my niece today after a podcast appearance on Truth Talk with Steve Cloward, and it was the second podcast I did this week. The other episode with the Mormon Renegade will drop shortly, and I’ll post it when it’s available.
I live amongst the dead and the brutalized, and sometimes its good to go on a bike ride with a living family member who represents all the possibility and potential of my family in the future. My niece has never known the horror of abuse, and while I vainly think it might have something to do with her surly uncle’s reputation, I know that it is only by the grace of God that she gets to keep her innocence. The world assails our children on all sides, and she’s at the age where the assault is beginning to take on its full force.
Her brothers are battling the urges of testosterone, namely the boyish impulse to settle everything with fists and feet. Their surly uncle has made it clear that they are not to be physically violent with any member of his family, for the consequences shall be severe. Today, my nephew did duck walks when he tried to get around the prohibition on using his hands and feet by swinging a pair of pants at his sister. It is hard to fashion good men from the coarse clay of boys, but it is the work elders are called to by God. He did duckwalks down the driveway and realized that duckwalks are far more difficult than the 30 second spanking he might have gotten from his father and mother.
I have never had to hit my nephews and nieces, because the cold blooded thousand yard stare is enough to make them wonder. I let them imagine what might happen, but I do not tolerate or explain the what ifs. There are no what ifs. There is only what I have said and decreed in my role as an uncle, an elder, setting the example of self-control and hard resolve by never giving a child power over my reactions even when I am angry at their behavior.
We all balance life with the demands of work and family, and while it is more fun to sit and watch an episode of Fringe with my nephews and my niece, it is necessary to sometimes deal with the unpleasant behavior that children choose from time to time. They look at us to see the way in which they should go, and I tell my nephews that if I do not do something, they are not to do whatever it is, and that the choices I make and the example I set are the path that they should follow. It keeps me honest, and mindful of how my own actions influence them.
It is my hope that my nephews never have to become the type of men who work with this subject matter or material, but the youngest wants to be a police officer. There’s time for him to pick something else, but if he follows that path, he will inevitably be confronted with the worst that humanity has to offer. The Lord directs our path, and sometimes he picks the work that others shudder to do for us. I was made to write and research and put pieces of puzzles together, in order to solve the ugliest pictures of human nature and behavior.
I go on bike rides with my nephews and my niece and hikes with a chihuahua who accompanies me everywhere to take a break from the ugliness, and I sometimes go to the finest centers of goodness known to man: the southern diners that dot the highways around my stomping grounds, where old ladies call me honey and ask what I want to eat. There is no better break known to man than the lunch break.
Go ride a bike, hug your loved ones, sit with your dogs in the cool evening air. It can’t all be work and horror. When you’re done, go fashion something that will live on after you lose your portion under the sun, when your loves and your memories vanish. It’s the only life under this sun you get, and when you’re gone, the ones who you loved and were loved by will miss you.