I love them too, Tim Barrus. And I am hoping you have the strength to keep asking them and getting them to talk.

They need to know it isn’t their fault. They need to an adult to be attentive to them. Thank goodness they have you.

And not for nothing, but I read every single word of Visitor Parking and did not think a single word of it was funny.

Tell your boys this:

The sarcasm, the bite, the poking fun to me (a reader) was not directed at ‘rape’ or what the boys went through. It was directed at members of society who have let THEM down over and over and over again. We failed to protect, we failed to respect, we failed to cherish and honor the boys’ right to a life free from this kind of horror. The “society” needs to understand how we are giving rapists permission to abuse them. We must know this and we must understand that we are kidding ourselves if we don’t believe it. We have to be shaken and sometimes made fun of to understand how stupid and backward our priorities really are — to see clearly how we failed our own children. Tell them we need to know so we can think about ways to stop condoning it.

Tim, I don’t know how to explain how that article shook me to my core. I’ve not stopped crying since I read it. I’m supposed to be doing things but I can’t move. I can’t think of anything else. I hate that they have to go through this and I wish so much it wasn’t so.

None of it was funny. It was hauntingly, profoundly disturbing and I can’t shut it off now. I knew that prison was a problem in this country. I knew it. Just posted about it the other day. But I swear on my life I had no idea about the problem inside prison as it relates to juveniles.

I was focused on outside the walls. I was delusional. I thought I WAS dealing with what was. I was not.

I was dealing with what I could see. I needed to understand that current state outside the wires is something completely different from the inside. Current state priority number 1 has changed for me in a massive way.

I still don’t know what I am going to do about it. I will not ever be the same after reading that and I am grieving intensely the loss of my ignorance. But I sincerely thank you for opening my eyes.