By
now, the world has learned of the possible fate of six-year-old Etan
Patz who vanished during a short and, for him, unprecedented walk
alone from his home to a school bus stop in New York's SoHo district
one morning in May, 1979.
Just
last week and, dramatically, on the thirty-third anniversary of his
disappearance, police received a tip that a man, since moved to New
Jersey, had crossed Etan's path that day and, on a psychotic impulse,
had strangled the life out of him. His body, discarded with the
trash, would never be found.
It
was Etan's sudden and disturbing disappearance, more than any other,
which had shaken America to its bones, leaving it perennially alarmed
and obsessively suspicious for decades to come.
His
disappearance would be the catalyst for a fundamental reordering of
America – and indeed, the world - along lines dictated by
boundless paranoia and a near-total erosion of trust.
Police
Commissioner Raymond Kelly, himself a witness to the decades-long
quest to uncover the boy's fate, has expressed tentative
satisfaction with the credibility of the subsequent confession freely
given by this most recent and, to date, most likely suspect.
Strikingly,
Kelly now suggests the distinct possibility that Etan's murderer was
motivated, not by sexual desire, but by sheer craziness. The
self-confessed killer is said to be bipolar and schizophrenic, a
pathological tangle more than adequate in explaining an otherwise
unmotivated killing.
And
this, decades after Etan Patz - his identity, his infectious smile,
his beauty, and his heartbreaking absence – had been expropriated
as fuel for a witch burning which continues to smolder to this day.
NAMBLA,
a very young organization at the time, found itself thrust into the
national spotlight several years after Etan's disappearance when a
photograph from a calendar was seized by
police and the F.B.I. from the home of one of its members.
Although
authorities said its subject bore a striking resemblance to Etan, his
own parents flatly denied that it could be their son. Bizarrely, the
police helpfully suggested that NAMBLA must have airbrushed a "cleft"
into Etan's chin to make the calendar boy, somehow, more appealing.
What
they failed to mention was that the picture had been taken in 1968,
the same year as the calendar's publication and some five years prior
to Etan's birth.
No
matter. The press ran with the story and the myth of NAMBLA as evil
child trafficking cabal was born.
Inconveniently
for the police and the F.B.I., NAMBLA held its own press conferences
– one in New York and another, simultaneously, in Boston – where
they revealed the truth of the photograph's provenance, complete with
copies of the original calendar bearing the date “1968”.
Though
law enforcement was forced to admit their "mistake" in a
subsequent press conference, the damage to NAMBLA's reputation with
the public was, nevertheless, beyond repair.
Public
perception of the organization would never countenance the
possibility of a benign intent. Perhaps that would have been the
case even without these spurious allegations but, if first
impressions are the most important, then NAMBLA's effective debut
onto the world stage would be nothing short of catastrophic.
Although
many, no doubt, were bitterly disappointed that the Etan Patz/NAMBLA
connection had been so decisively dispatched, the formation in the
public mind of a link between the organization and what would be
perceived as a flood of child disappearances in the decade to come
became, nonetheless, indelible.
The
public was in no mood to be reasonable or fair-minded, led around by
the nose, as they were, by a cynical and opportunistic press who
routinely crafted their distortions and confabulations in concert
with law enforcement as well as zealous, obsessive crusaders, a
practice which continues today.
It
was, perhaps then, that the organization learned an essential, hard
lesson about the press: the less popular a people or their ideas, the
less likely they will be accurately represented by the media.
Pedro
Hernandez has not yet been convicted of Etan Patz' murder and it is
still too soon to come to any definitive conclusions.
Given
the likelihood that Etan's body will never be found and that
Hernandez' word, alone, forms the basis for the charges now brought
against him, it is entirely possible that the probable answer to the
little boy's disappearance will never be entirely satisfactory.
Already,
there are hints that some will always refuse to accept the
possibility that a "non-pedophile" might be responsible for
such a terrible act.
Many
are, after all, entirely invested in a worldview which conflates the
hideous actions of rare and deranged individuals with those who
openly acknowledge a love for children or adolescents.
After
all, much has been built upon that foundation of fear and loathing
during these past thirty years.
And
then there is the now irreconcilable fact that a man currently
languishing in a Pennsylvania prison for having sex with boys, Jose
Ramos, was found responsible in civil court for Etan's disappearance,
having once dated the boy's babysitter, despite his denials and a
paucity of evidence.
Vacating
that judgment would, no doubt, be most distressing for those who had
previously pointed to a convicted pedophile as the murderer of Etan
Patz, a little boy who had become, unwittingly, a cornerstone in the
strident and shrill anti-pedophile movement.
At
the time of Etan's disappearance, we couldn't have imagined the
dramatic extent of fundamental, social upheaval, already then in
motion, just as today it is difficult to remember how different our
world once was.
Ever
more terrible, vicious, and unjust laws, enacted over the decades
since Etan disappeared, have permanently incapacitated alarming
numbers of our citizens.
Children,
who once would have enjoyed significant freedom of movement and of
association, must now derive all intellectual and emotional
sustenance from those adults who pass criminal background checks and
who have been carefully vetted by government.
Kids
today are elaborately cocooned in their homes and their schools in an
abundance of caution which is seen never to be entirely adequate.
They
are presumed to be continuously in peril of kidnap - or worse - and
to possess no innate instincts for self preservation, even as
adolescents.
Their
opportunities to play with other children are closely structured,
scheduled and supervised by ever-fearful parents. Even their
"hand-offs" to other qualified adults are exquisitely
coordinated.
Unrelated adults
who show any warmth or fondness for kids are viewed with immediate
suspicion and many have adopted, instead, a more acceptable air of
indifference towards children. As with all distortions imposed by
social opprobrium, this will inevitably be to the detriment of the
kids themselves.
This
is a very different world from that which existed when Etan Patz
triumphantly ventured alone, for the first time, down the street to
buy a soda and to wait for his school bus.
Many
of us still remember when we first saw Etan; a beautiful, delightful,
happy boy looking past the camera to his photographer father, beaming
poignantly from a "missing child" poster.
Our
hearts ache no less today when we see, once again, that vanished boy
from a vanished time; a boy who will always be, tragically and
forever, six years old.
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