Publisher's Notebook:
Remember When Mothers Allowed Girls to Go for a Walk?

By J. Edward Pawlick
March 17, 2003

Remember when mothers weren't afraid to let their girls go for a walk? It wasn't long ago -- back in the 1970s, when boys would ride their bikes to an empty lot to play ball.

Then 9-year-old Sarah Pryor disappeared from the streets of Wayland in 1985.

Now as we drive the streets of Massachusetts, no child waits alone for a school bus. Parents are at every stop.

In Millis, a friend will not allow his high school daughter to walk or bike even one-mile to the center of town to work at Roche Brothers -- a high school student must be driven!!

We're all prisoners!

But we're told by our lawyers and judges that we just don't understand -- the rights of sexual offenders are even more important! And the rights of "independent" judges are much more important because they protect us from ourselves. After all, we just live here! If our children have to be kept in a cage, so be it!

Now, a new independent report to the Court (commissioned by the Court itself) finally gives us a glimmer that we at MassNews have been right all along. It says the courts are "dysfunctional" and businesses are avoiding our state as a result.

That's very nice to know and it is important. But how about our children and our families!?! Aren't they important also?

The family of Molly Bish, who was 16 when she disappeared in 2000 from a lake in Warren where she was a lifeguard, has gotten a lot of publicity for that tragedy. But what good will it do? Will anything change?

We are told that the "good old days" were terrible. But many of us can still remember the 1970s, either as an adult or as a child, and we decide for ourselves.

When my children went to school in Weston, no parent was allowed near the bus stop. Only a "weird" mother would stand with her child. I remember well, because we had one mother near us who did that. And her child suffered as a result.

But it all changed with Sarah Pryor. And then the young daughter of a friend of mine shortly thereafter fought off a would-be attacker in Weston.

So now our children live in a cage. They can't run and jump on their way to school! And we're in that cage also. The children have to be driven everywhere.

But the "right" of Judge Lopez to an appointment for life is held sacred. After all, we citizens are not to be trusted to decide such important things. We need an "independent" judiciary where lawyers and the judges instruct us in what our society should look like. (The effort to remove Judge Lopez is costing us more than the total yearly budget of the commission that we fund to monitor judges.)

The lawyers and judges tell us we must not be "vindictive." But who is being vindictive? We're not looking to punish these people who are not able, for whatever reason, to live in a civilized society.

We're only looking to keep them off the streets!

The elite tell everyone that we have the best system of justice in the world, as though we never make mistakes in our courts. But we do make mistakes -- always have and always will. When we had a God-driven society, we all knew that no person is perfect. Our government was built on that assumption, with checks and balances to keep everyone honest.

We are going to make mistakes. We will never have a perfect system of justice as the lawyers and judges keep telling us.. They are not that good, anymore than anyone else. Finally a respected committee has told the judges that our courts are "dysfunctional." But they reached only the tip of the iceberg. The citizens must regain control of their courts at a local level!