This verdict makes me feel sorry for Kyle Rittenhouse

Telling someone that the wrong they did was right is damaging.

I had a neighbor who ran over a child with his truck. It was purely an accident. The child died. The whole neighborhood was devastated.

My neighbor never drove again. His truck sat on flat tires out back rusting out. He ended up losing his job as a construction foreman and worked odd jobs to make ends meet. He looked sad, fragile.

His family circled around, told him they knew it was an accident, gave him love and care. His minister sat with him on his porch nearly every Sunday after church. He often needed to process what had happened.

I remember one conversation I had with him when his son was about to turn 16, about how scared he was to give his son a car, which he saw as a weapon. He didn’t want what happened to him to ever happen to his son. But despite not having been behind the wheel of a car for a decade, he did end up teaching his son to drive, how to be careful, how to be responsible, that life was precious. Slowly he seemed to heal.

Today I picked up the teenage boys I always pick up from high school on Fridays. As we left the car rider lane, the news of Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal came on the radio. We all listened quietly.

“I wonder what it is like to have done something so terrible — by accident or on purpose — and to have to live with that while people tell you that you are a…