March 9

You can call me superwoman. I doubt too many could walk away from a fall down eight cement steps. Today I’d like to share my take on the Jeffrey Dahmer story. There’s been criticism against Netflix for even putting something like this together, for seemingly “glorifying” a monster like Dahmer. I live in Wisconsin, and I have a different take on what we are to take from watching this.

This was a story of racism. Dahmer came to realize that the police and others didn’t look very hard for black and other minority victims. Two cops were even put under scrutiny for abandoning their chance to save a 14-year-old Laotian they caught Dahmer with but allowed Dahmer to assure them the boy was okay. Dahmer was even put in prison at one point, and his father begged them to give him a therapist. But they didn’t.

Today people who are considered mental cases are allowed to have guns because otherwise we’re “discriminating.”

It’s fascinating to see how Dahmer got away with everything. He had a neighbor in his apartment who kept calling because of the strange noises and smells but they kept ignoring her. She was, of course, black.

The two cops didn’t spend much time on their “paid leave” because, as they said, their union won’t stand for that treatment of them. And sure enough, they were back on the force, and it turns out they were making anonymous threatening calls against the Laotians, telling them to go back to their own country.

Then you finally get Dahmer in prison after he kills number 17, serving life because Wisconsin didn’t have the death penalty. The apartment building where he killed everyone was condemned and torn down. One prisoner thought Dahmer got too much attention, as people wrote him letters calling him a hero. When that prisoner found out what he did, and then Dahmer got himself baptized so he could still go to heaven, he beat Dahmer to death. Said God told him to. This was set up to look like he had help to corner Dahmer alone.

This was an amazing piece that talked about the fault lines in our society today. It had open ends, such as what happened to Dahmer’s killer, and to the woman who wanted the victims’ names remembered. But open ends are what this society is all about. I’m reading now in Mother Jones about how black cops are treated more punitively than white cops; we saw an instance of that with the five black cops who beat a black victim. They were instantly fired, no questions asked. I still to this day don’t know their side of that beating.

I highly recommend watching The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. We need to understand how these kinds of people can happen.