JonBenet: a haunting symbol of all troubled childhoods

The face of JonBenet Ramsey emerges once more from the dark archives of her death a dozen years ago.

Her smile is frozen at age 6, the eternal image of a little girl whose appeal and sadness continue to haunt us.

We see this isn’t just a picture of a child at play but a child pitched into an adult world of mascara and lip gloss as a beauty contestant, and paraded before audiences, cameras and the monsters who prey on children.

She’s in the news again by default. An announcement by the district attorney of Boulder County, Colo., has cleared her parents and brother of complicity in JonBenet’s death, lifting a black cloud of suspicion from them.

New DNA techniques prove that someone else strangled her that icy winter night in 1996 but whose identity remains unknown.

So life goes on in the town nestled in the foothills of the Rockies, and the murder of JonBenet is rarely discussed.

I find it difficult not placing her in the larger context of abused children as incidents occur in L.A. of babies killed in the crossfire of gangland feuds, or left to die in the street by hit-and-run drivers or tortured by parents whose madness seeks vengeance in their own aberrant worlds.

JonBenet suffered none of those abuses by the family she was born into, but one questions the wisdom of parents who prod their children to grow up before they’re ready.

It’s a variation of the stage-door mother syndrome so familiar in Hollywood -- a child becomes the distorted mirror image of the parents who seek redemption of their own failures through the success of their children.

Not all of the troubled kids die at the hands of strangers or grow up twisted by the pressures that accompany a drive to succeed. Some outlive the demanding parents and go on to normal lives in the entertainment world or out of it.

But I know of others who, rejected by Hollywood’s star-makers and bearing the guilt for bashing their mother’s dream, have either sunk into swamps of drugs and criminality, or who, as failures, have ultimately taken their own lives.

The demand that children grow up faster than they should reaches beyond the needs of their parents.

In a culture grown cold to a child’s spirit, we inundate them with movies, television shows and advertisements that lure them out of infancy into teenage and out of teenage into adulthood, as if no period of transition ever existed.

Children who are babies themselves have babies and go out with men who have no idea what family commitments are.

Young girls are pressed by exterior forces and by their peers to adopt the dress, manners and mores of their idols, called to be sexy and to free themselves of any restraints.

It isn’t a far reach to encapsulate all of that in the photograph of JonBenet Ramsey.

It isn’t a reach to see her face and to remember the names and faces of children who vanish into the night, never to be seen again.

It isn’t a reach to realize that predators exist as teachers, priests, relatives and Internet “pals.”

A photograph represents a snippet of eternity. It lasts long after the living person or the emulsified event has imprinted on our brains. Abraham Lincoln lives forever on film, a tall, gangling figure in stovepipe hat, mingling with the Union troops in America’s Civil War; so does the rigid airship Hindenburg afire where it fell at the foot of its mooring dock; Pearl Harbor in flames; Hiroshima devastated by an atomic bomb; a mushroom cloud over the Bikini Atoll.

I can still re-imagine the face of Megan Kanka, the 7-year-old lured from her New Jersey home in 1994 by a convicted pedophile.

She rode her bicycle into destiny one perfect summer evening and was raped and murdered by the predator who dumped her body in a park that had once been her play area.

Hers is the name that identifies the law, Megan’s Law, requiring police agencies to release information regarding sex offenders.

Megan’s photograph reveals a face untouched by makeup, glowing with the innocence of a normal child in a neighborhood once thought to be safe; the face of vulnerability smiling forever into the internal mechanism of a camera.

I remain sad in memory that JonBenet Ramsey died such a terrible death.

I’m glad that her family has been absolved of murder. Rumors, gossip and clumsy police work kept them under suspicion all those years.

The case remains open. In a sense so do all the incidents of child suffering, at home or in war, whose deaths remain our cultural burden.

We have much to grieve for, and the face of a little girl gone too soon reminds us of that.

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almtz13@aol.com