On Chasing Brad Through Purgatory by Stephen Benatar Page A

could have tried to do something about.” I paused. “Though of course it reached out way beyond the poor on my own doorstep.”
    â€œYou’re doing well Dan I reckon you’re doing well. I guess you’ll be out of here in no time.”
    I hadn’t been setting out to impress him nor expecting either encouragement or understanding from such a seemingly unlikely quarter. So to add to all my other sins I was patently a patronizing git. I smiled a little bleakly. “Thank you for your sympathy. You should have been a priest.” I looked about me at my tiny cell. “This should have been the confessional.”
    He gave his yellow gap-toothed grin and meditatively—raspingly—rubbed his leathery unshaven chin. “But you always did show a fondness for them old western movies. Din’t you boy?”
    Yes especially for the ones so old they were frequently in black-and-white. Where the good guys had invariably won and the bad guys had invariably received their just deserts. A fairy tale for all ages: monochrome simplicity. Why couldn’t life itself have been like that?
    But if it had been … if it had been…? The question then was this. Would old Danny Boy have emerged wholeheartedly on the side of the marshal and the homesteaders? Or might he have been one of those outlaws weakly swayed by the rationalizations of a greedy and uncaring boss?
    Because—yes—the indifference had reached way out. Dramatically. Victims of earthquake, flood and cyclone. Victims of war and civil war and genocide. Of terrorism. Victims of murder and torture and mutilation. Had I ever really cared ? (Apart from New York and London, that is, but they of course were easy.) Often plenty of lip service naturally—maybe a reaction of genuine abhorrence lasting a full five minutes before the sigh and the switching of the channels and the pouring of the glass of Scotch. But could you really be raised to feel more than that … just that very fleeting moment of compassion? No man is an island. Any man’s death diminishes me. Because I am involved in mankind.
    John Donne was Brad’s favourite poet. I’m not sure I’d even heard of him before I met Brad. I do know I could never have recited a single line of his entire output.
    And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
    I wish I could have written that. I mean I wish I could have written that in the knowledge of its being an absolutely honest reflection of the way I felt.
    â€œHe lacked compassion Clem.”
    â€œWho did?”
    â€œThat’s what they should have written on my tombstone. Or”—once more I had forgotten—“should be about to write on it. I think that sums it up.”
    In fact I had usually been more moved by the agony of just one individual. Only look at that girl of fifteen who had been killed by over fifty knife wounds slowly inflicted by her boyfriend. Or at the young man who had been kicked to death by three assailants in the street—every bone in his head had been broken. Or at families, often children, who awoke to find their homes on fire and themselves most terrifyingly trapped.
    Or think about Ken Bigley. Imprisoned for weeks and growing old and growing thin from anticipating his threatened end—decapitation. And think about his eleventh-hour escape from the house, his stumbling flight across the field at its rear, his no doubt burgeoning hope of deliverance. Think about his sudden awareness that he had been spotted; that his jailers were fast catching up on him. Whilst brandishing their implement of execution. Only think about it.
    Or think about James Bulger, the three-year-old plastered in model paint and then stoned to death, his body left on the railway line, to be cut in half by an early-morning goods train.
    Or think about anyone, absolutely anyone, who’d had the misfortune to die horrifically. Where was God, on all