Hear me out

I am an eavesdropper; always have been.

My earliest memories include listening to adult conversation, trying to piece together what it was they were talking about. I listen to nearby conversations in airports, at the doctor's office, in convenience stores and while riding the bus.

I have even been known to listen to a single side of a conversation when I catch someone else on the telephone, and with the wide-spread use of cellular telephones, that is becoming easier and easier to do, whether I want to or not.

This week, Rachael and I had a late lunch in the swell neighborhood restaurant in our building -- it's Mexican and serves great chicken flautas -- and we both got hooked on the cell phone conversation in the next booth.

A fellow in his twenties took a call from his grandmother, at least he referred to the caller as Grandma, and they gabbed for almost fifteen minutes. Have you ever heard Abbott and Costello do Who's On First? This was funnier.

He apparently did some sort of sales work; what he sells never came up, but he was telling Granny about an upcoming business trip. She wasn't talking loud enough for us to hear her side of the conversation. He was talking loud enough for both of them.

"I'm leaving Friday for ten days, Grandma."

"I don't know. Paraguay or Uruguay, one of those two."

"I don't know. In South America, I think; maybe Central America. I'm not sure. They speak Spanish."

"A little bit, and the company is paying for an interpreter."

"Yeah, I'm flying. Uh huh. It's too far to drive."

"No. My boss said my commissions are lower than anyone else's and so I have to be the one to go."

"I'm not going to get fired, Grandma! But I may quit; I'm twenty-seven years old and I'm not even making five thousand a week!"

I thought Rachael was going to choke on her refried beans on that last one; it was the funniest thing he said during the entire conversation. The saddest, too. I suspect the fellow is not the only twenty-seven-year-old who expects to make five thousand dollars a week.

Nor the only one uncertain where Uruguay is.

Where is justice?

Now we know what a human life is worth in Seattle.

Three teen-age Seattle boys have pleaded guilty to the unprovoked beating of 53-year-old Edward McMichael last October 25th. McMichael died nine days later of injuries sustained in the beating.

He was something of a local celebrity, a shy fellow known as The Tuba Man, who regularly provided impromptu tuba performances at local sporting events. And he is dead for no other reason that he was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and caught someone's attention.

The boys were each fifteen years old the night of the attack. They pleaded guilty to charges of first-degree manslaughter, but because they are juveniles, the most any of the three can receive as punishment for the senseless crime is 72 weeks in the King County Juvenile Detention Center.

County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg called such sentences "inadequate", when he announced Friday that the county had agreed to accept the guilty pleas, adding that Washington State law does not allow stiffer sentences for juveniles defendants in such cases.

Their confessions allowed them to escape the possibility that they could be arrested on more serious charges at some later time. According to Satterberg, the trio of teens could not be charged now, without the confessions, because none of the witnesses to the beating would come forward and identify the attackers.

Seventy-two weeks. Maximum. That is not even ten days for each of McMichael's 53 years on earth. And his three attackers will still be juveniles when they walk away from their cells sometime next year.

Tell me; where is the justice in that?