Life is Unfair
by John Merrow
I have been trying to wrap my brain around that thought this week and hope to connect some seemingly unconnected thoughts and ideas on this page.
We are putting the finishing touches on “REBIRTH: New Orleans,” our 1-hour film about schooling there since Katrina and the flooding. We’ve dedicated the film to the kids who were shot to death with handguns during the years we filmed there. That casualty list includes a young girl who is in the film. Christine Marcelin was just 15 when she was murdered.
When you meet Christine early in the film, you learn that she wants to go to Princeton and become a veterinarian. She was killed last spring in an act of senseless violence, shot by teenagers who apparently feared that she might know something about a murder they had committed a few days earlier.
Life is tragically unfair.
Here’s another example: This week the obituary page of the New York Times reported the news of the death of 82-year-old Olen Burrage, a long time member of the Ku Klux Klan and owner of the Mississippi farm where the bodies of three slain civil rights workers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew
