Who Are You Trying to Protect?

Love

Aug 19

Written By Maggie Snow

So y’all know I love murder.

Don’t read too deeply into it.

Please.

I fear it won’t bode well for me if you do.

I will get to that with my therapist someday.

But it ain’t high on the list.

So there is a murder trial going on right now.

A sad one.

A viral one.

One I text my friends about daily, watch entirely too many TikToks about, and am currently watching live every day while I get paid to work at a CHRISTIAN Academy.

We read and we don’t judge.

Everyone is welcome here.

Including me.

Okay?

Anyways.

A mother stands accused of murdering her three children.

Her defense argues that she is not criminally responsible by reason of insanity, with postpartum psychosis at the center of their case.

And my friends and I do not agree on what we believe happened.

At all.

Let me sidebar here—

None of us have any experience whatsoever in criminal law, law enforcement, psychiatry, or medicine.

I have never even been chosen to sit on a jury.

I did go to a murder trial once.

But that is about as advanced as my knowledge of court proceedings, evidence, criminal responsibility, or the law goes.

Basically, no one should be calling any of us as expert witnesses.

And yet here we are.

Experts.

Obviously.

We all have opinions.

And those opinions are based on what we have watched and read, sure.

But they are also based on our guts.

Our empathy.

Our biases.

Our experiences.

Our fears.

Our beliefs about people.

Our beliefs about mental illness.

Our beliefs about motherhood and fatherhood and responsibility and culpability.

Our own definitions of justice.

And when one of my friends has an opposing view, I find myself wondering where their empathy and gut and biases and experiences are leading them.

Because the truth is, I look at this woman and I have empathy for her.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have empathy for her children.

Of course I do.

Three children are dead.

There is no version of this story where that isn’t horrific.

But empathy for the mother may look, to someone else, like a lack of empathy for the children.

Empathy for the father may look like saying he was a good father or husband.

Empathy for the medical professionals involved may look like dismissing a mother who was reportedly struggling and asking for help.

And the opposite can be true too.

Empathy for the children may look like cruelty toward their mother.

Anger toward the father may erase the possibility that he, too, experienced something unimaginable.

Blaming the medical system may ignore the complicated reality of treating someone in crisis.

Everyone seems to be protecting someone.

And depending on who you are protecting, justice starts to look very different.

I think sometimes we mistake that difference for a lack of empathy.

We think:

If you cared about the children, you couldn’t possibly feel sorry for her.

Or:

If you understood postpartum psychosis, you couldn’t possibly want her punished.

If you cared about her, you would blame him.

If you cared about him, you wouldn’t blame him.

We take the direction of someone’s empathy and use it as evidence of whether they have any at all.

But maybe empathy isn’t that simple.

I have a protector at work.

She would never let anything happen to me.

If someone talks to me sideways, she is coming to my defense.

If someone has a problem with me, she now has a problem with them.

And she will make that problem known.

She is a protector.

And Lord help anyone who gets in her way when she enters defender mode.

She is justice.

I have another friend who will sit with me while I tell her about the person who talked to me sideways.

She’ll listen.

She’ll let me be mad.

But eventually she might say,

“Do you think maybe they meant…?”

And dammit.

She’ll ask questions.

She’ll make me think about what might have been happening with the other person.

She’ll help me see the human being behind the thing they did.

She is empathy.

And I need them both.

I need the friend who is willing to metaphorically beat someone up because they hurt me.

And I need the friend who reminds me that the person she is metaphorically beating up is also a human being.

Neither one loves me more.

Neither one cares more about right and wrong.

Neither one is inherently kinder than the other.

They are simply protecting different things.

One protects me.

The other protects my ability to see beyond myself.

And thank God for both.

Maybe that is what I am seeing when my friends and I argue about this trial.

We are watching the same testimony.

Hearing the same evidence.

Looking at the same unimaginable tragedy.

And our empathy keeps landing in different places.

They may be fighting for a kind of justice that looks different from mine.

They may feel more empathy for someone I struggle to have empathy for.

I may feel compassion for someone they struggle to understand.

That doesn’t automatically make them cruel.

And it doesn’t automatically make me naïve.

It doesn’t even mean one of us has empathy and the other doesn’t.

Maybe our empathy just went somewhere different.

Because justice and empathy can sometimes seem like opposing forces.

Accountability versus mercy.

Consequences versus compassion.

Protecting the person who was hurt versus understanding the person who caused the hurt.

But I don’t think they always have to oppose each other.

Sometimes accountability is love.

Sometimes mercy is.

Sometimes justice says:

This cannot be allowed.

And sometimes empathy asks:

But how did we get here?

We probably need people willing to ask both.

And maybe I can use this logic in a lot more areas of my life than a murder trial I have absolutely no qualifications to be analyzing while sitting in my office at a Christian school.

Because we do this everywhere.

We assume that if someone doesn’t care about something the way we care about it, they must not care enough.

If they don’t protect the person we are protecting, they must be against them.

If their compassion lands somewhere ours doesn’t, theirs must be missing.

And sometimes that may be true.

Sometimes people are cruel.

Sometimes people are selfish.

Sometimes people are simply wrong.

Love doesn’t make every opinion correct.

Empathy doesn’t make every conclusion equal.

Facts still matter.

Harm still matters.

Accountability still matters.

But disagreement doesn’t always reveal an absence of goodness.