The Public Duty Doctrine.24: Stolen

What if the government created a law and didn't tell anyone about it? What if you were harmed by not knowing this law? What if you tried to warn people about it and no one listened? What if in time everyone around you thought this issue had stolen your life?

Every one of us is prone to being stolen. The oldest child's life is often stolen. Drugs, sex, love, hate, beauty, ugliness, pride steals lives. Being too agreeable, being too rebellious, believing there is a God, believing there is not a God can cause a life to be stolen.

You might say that extreme personalities are prone to being stolen. However, don't most of us live on the edge? You wake up one morning wanting to know how I got here.

I remember, though, the day I learned about The Public Duty Doctrine, like the day my father was killed, J.F.K , Martin Luther King, Jr., Bobby Kennedy, the day my captain mounted a .50 caliber on our bridge wing and shot at whales, the day my child was sexually assaulted, the day another child succumbed to MS, the day the second tower fell while my phone was pressed to my ear, talking with my oldest daughter. I remember when my life was stolen.

Quoting from Tess Gallagher's short-story "The Lover of Horses":

"Ever since my great-grandfather's outbreaks of gypsy-necessity, members of my family have been stolen by things -- by mad ambitions, by musical instruments, by otherwise harmless pursuits from mushroom hunting to childbearing or, as was my father's case, by the more easily recognized and popular obsession with card playing. To some extent, I still think it was failure of imagination in this respect that brought about his diminished prospects in the life of our family.

"But even my mother had been powerless against the attraction of a man so convincingly driven. When she met him at a birthday dance held at the country house of one of her young friends, she asked him what he did for a living. My father pointed to a deck of cards in his shirt pocket and said, 'I play cards.' But love is such as it is, and although my mother was otherwise a deadly practical woman, it seemed she could fall in love with no man but my father.

"So it is possible that the propensity to be stolen is somewhat contagious when ordinary people come into contact with people such as my father. Though my mother loved him at the time of the marriage, she soon began to behave as if she had been stolen from a more fruitful and upright life which she was always imagining might have been hers."