Rules can’t anticipate every evil

There’s this place we all hope for.

A place where things always go according to plan. Where leaders never let us down. Where there’s a cure for cancer, civility reigns, cars always start, computers never crash, and chocolate has no calories.

It’s a place where police officers always arrive in the nick of time, where abuse never happens, bad guys are always caught, and kids never get hurt.

Doesn’t exist. Never has. Never will. Which we tend to prove on a fairly regular basis.

Our latest reminder of this occurred last week, compliments of Joshua Powell. He was the father who, two years ago, became a “person of interest” in the disappearance of his wife, Susan. She went missing one evening while he took his two sons on a midnight camping trip in the dead of winter.

If you’ve followed the news, you know that last week, Mr. Powell — after suffering a major setback in his attempts to regain custody of his kids — killed his two young sons and committed suicide.

The details of this act were so horrific that it broke the composure of the toughest among us. I watched an interview of a police chief with 30 years of experience — witnessing everything that might be witnessed by an officer with that much time in — who struggled to maintain his composure while telling us that this particular incident was the worst he’d ever seen.

In the face of all of this, we sit and watch and wonder. Wonder what “should’a, could’a, would’a” been done. Wonder how it might have been prevented.

Should a person suspected of killing his own wife have been allowed to continue seeing his sons? No charges against him had been filed. No body had been found. Suspicions were high and circumstantial evidence was pointing more and more toward him, but he was still free and was still entitled to the presumption of innocence.

Do we really want to live under a code that says “well, we think you did it and, so, we’re taking this or that away from you until we find out — if we ever do — otherwise”?

And, so, we tread lightly and keep our fingers crossed.

Should the agencies we set up to protect kids bear the brunt of criticism? Should “supervised visits” always occur at a neutral site? Should only a single caseworker be present when such visits occur? Should there be two caseworkers, three, more? Should they be trained in self-defense? Should they be carrying mace, pepper-spray, firearms?

Should the police respond immediately to any indication of a problem during such visits? Do we make them aware beforehand of such visits? At what costs in allocation of assets? And what should be the “priority tree” with regard to competing demands for response?

In a perfect world, we’d be able to single out the dangerous among us. We’d be able to recognize the perverts and pedophiles. The “waiting for any opportunity” rapists and muggers. The seemingly normal neighbor about to flip out or the spouse who’s decided that he or she has had enough and thinks that the only solution is a permanent one.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in such a world and never will. Still, we do what we can. We look for lessons to be learned and, then, do our best to change practices in response to those lessons.

The thing is, for every lesson we learn, there’s going to be another one missed. For every rule we put in place, there’ll always be another to write. And, while we do this, the manual we’re writing gets thicker, the rules overlap, responses become complicated, confusion and misunderstanding appear, and “perfection” is never found.

I hated listening to the story of Josh Powell and what he did to his kids. Like you, I sat there wishing that there was some way we could prevent things like this from ever happening.

Our problem is that we’re human. Which means “not perfect.” And, no matter what we do, there’ll always be another ugly story that comes along.

Still, we’ll try, because it’s something we do.

And that, one hopes, is a trait that never disappears.

Larry Simoneaux lives in Edmonds. Send comments to larrysim@comcast.net.