Deborah Lipp

I have no rational reason for being so upset about the JonBenet Ramsey arrest. None. Except that when I heard, my first thought was “I thought the parents did it.”

That’s what I thought. Am I the only one? The parents of JonBenet Ramsey were tried by media and found guilty. With no arrests and no hard evidence, the mags & rags pumped out the speculation and the minutia and fed us a scenario such that only the parents could have done it.

And meanwhile these people lost their daughter.

A dead daughter, the media circus, and the loss of reputation; the total devastation of reputation. They must have thought that history would remember them as murderers. They must have spent ten years dealing with how that felt, on top of everything else.

And here I am speculating again.

Because that’s what we do. We read the stories and we imagine. We put ourselves in their shoes. We project and we think our projection constitutes rational thought. We think we’re all CSI and we can put the pieces together and aren’t we clever. We do it about serious things like murder, we do it about trivial things like the Anniston-Pitt breakup (which wasn’t trivial to them, I’m sure). It’s in the intonations of lunatic pundits like Limbaugh and Coulter. It fuels our conversation and our television and our fantasies. And rarely, ever so rarely, do we realize we are making it all up.

Get this people. We are making it all up.

That is all.

Update: We don’t even know today what we thought we knew yesterday.