Word: hearings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...death of a battered New York City child raises pity, fury and a question: How are you to react when you hear a scream in the night...
...fall in the kitchen. Over the years, colleagues and friends chose to believe the mugging and accident stories. Neighbors who heard the screams firsthand placed dozens of telephone calls to the police and to city authorities, who investigated but could prove no harm. The authorities did not hear the screams. After her beatings, the child lay brain dead, and the couple was in custody. Now no one in that building hears the screams...
...other buildings in New York, in other cities, in all the cities, new screams will take up the slack. Sometimes the authorities will respond, sometimes not. The beating of women and children will continue in the hidden boxes of apartments: evil, secret noise. You will hear the scream, and someone else will tell you that it wasn't a scream, it was a kettle whistle; and no one will be sure if there ever was a scream, until a body lies in evidence. How is the citizen-listener to react? Rush wildly through the corridors until the sound is unmistakable...
Civilization is tested by its screams. One has the choice to hear or not to hear; to detect location or not to detect location; to discover cause; to help or not to help. Along the many lines of choice, excuses and mistakes are possible, even reasonable. One is left with oneself and the screams, like two opponents. The Kitty Genovese case of 1964 keeps coming back, in which a young woman in Queens screamed for help, and everybody heard, and nobody helped. What were we to do? Edvard Munch's famous painting of The Cry keeps coming back, equally scary...
...never know how you will react to a scream until you hear one. I can tell you how you will react at first. You will freeze. Your head will snap like an alarmed bird's and your eyes will swell, long before any practical choices begin to form between hiding under the bed and leaping to the rescue. You will freeze because you will recognize the sound. It comes from you; all the panic and the pain; all the screams of one's life, uttered and quashed, there in that dreadful eruption that has scattered the air. All yours...