This is disgusting

I just found this article about Lucero Sarabia‘s relatives doing a vigil for her. The 21-year-old woman with two children was eight months pregnant when she disappeared from San Antonio, Texas five years ago.

The comments on this article are sickening:

2 kids, 8 months pregnant? WTF GET IN THE PROGRAM stop partying stop doing drugs get a job

and:

Why should she have? Each litter she squirted out gave her a bigger check each month. So while grandmama and aunts took care of her puppies, she could still go out and go to parties, and die her hair, and still have fun. I mean, having tons of kids doesn’t mean you need to change your behavior, does it?

God forbid a woman have three children. Shame on her. (My mother had seven.) God forbid she go to a party to celebrate Thanksgiving. God forbid she dye her hair. (I do.) As far as I know, Lucero wasn’t a drug abuser or on public assistance. She was married, too. Separated from her husband, it’s true, but married. And no matter who she was, she was also in all probability the victim of a terrible crime, and she doesn’t deserve to have complete strangers who know nothing say such awful things about her.

What the heck is wrong with people? Whatever happened to sympathy and compassion and all of that?

Going all out for Christmas presents

I like getting gifts for people more than I like receiving them. I’m having fun shopping this year. So far I’ve gotten:

A digital camera for my boyfriend Michael
A book called Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart for my dad (he is a botantist)
A Thomas Kincaid painting for my mom
A Memory Foam mattress pad for both of my parents
The biography Young Stalin for my brother Ian (an awesome book, btw, possibly the best biography I’ve ever read)

I plan to get a certain t-shirt for my friend John, and gift cards for Michael’s parents (I hate giving people gift cards, it seems to scream “I didn’t care enough to think of a specific gift for you so here’s this instead” but they asked for them), and a stuffed syphillis microbe for my brother Colin. (We hate each other. Seriously. Every year for the last few years, I’ve gotten him a stuffed microbe as a token of my disaffection and lack of esteem for him. So far he’s gotten gonorrhea, flesh-eating disease and the ebola virus. He has never commented on these gifts. In fact, we basically haven’t spoken to each other in at least five years, even though we’ve shared the same house for much of that time.)

I still haven’t decided what to get for my other friends and relatives. I’m sure I’ll think of something. I’ve got almost a month.

China executes two child traffickers

As China’s child trafficking saga continues, the government just executed two men who were found guilty of abducting fifteen children between them to sell. Several of those children have yet to be returned to their parents. From the article: Estimates of the numbers of victims are difficult to come by. The Chinese supreme court said 1,714 people were punished for abducting and trafficking children in the first 10 months of this year, as the government ramped up a crackdown on the crime. Since April, Chinese police have rescued 2,008 abducted children, the report said. That doesn’t seem like very much when I read an earlier report saying between 50,000 and 200,000 people are abducted every year.

A lot of boys are taken to be sold to childless couples who want sons. Exactly where do these childless couples think the children came from? If they know or even suspect these children were stolen from other families, they are just as guilty as the traffickers themselves and should be held accountable.

Additional articles:

The London Times
The Guardian
China View