So you think you are well informed? Have you heard the story about Baby Tommaso? Kidnappings just don’t make the kind of headlines they used to. It’s one thing if it is one of our own. But this poor kid was never going to have a Canadian passport.
On March 2 of this year, 18-month-old Tommaso Onofri was kidnapped from a farmhouse in Parma, Italy. The parents were tied up and gagged by two masked men, armed with a knife and a pistol. The gun turned out to be a fake. What wasn’t artificial was the unusual amount of suffering that this child had endured well before the kidnapping.
Baby Tommaso was an epileptic. We now know that shortly after he was taken, the kidnappers drove off on a motorcycle with the child sitting between them. Apparently they wiped out. If you have ever fallen off a motorcycle, you know it can be pretty scary. Who knows how frightened it can be for an 18-month-old epileptic child?
Apparently, Baby Tommaso started to cry uncontrollably. The kidnappers tried to strangle him to stop him from crying. When that failed, they picked up a shovel.
Italians were talking about nothing else this past Sunday. Signs were hung at soccer stadiums. In coffee shops and on talk shows, people were demanding the death penalty. The Pope, who had prayed for Baby Tommaso after he was abducted, was now praying for his soul. A question now for the Canadian soul. If a child is beaten to death with a shovel in Italy, should it matter to Canadians?
You are not being scolded for not knowing or caring enough about a kidnap murder in Europe. Even after the story had hit some of the wires on Sunday morning, it was not front and centre in most of the world’s major newspapers that I scanned that day. You don’t have to be as Catholic as the Pope to feel guilt. I feel plenty of it right now.
With hindsight, I have to say that I was spending far too much time on Sunday trying to figure out how Stephen Harper’s poor wardrobe choices were going to affect Canada’s standing in the Bush White House. On Sunday night I was watching Pamela Anderson’s bizarre effort at getting me to watch cosmetic cleavage while listening to stupid jokes about seal bashing. I found myself asking deep journalistic questions like, “How did Mattel get so much plastic into one little android?” and “Why am I devoting more than 30 seconds of my life watching a lap dancer reading from a teleprompter?”
On Saturday, April Fool’s, one sick joker led police investigators to a riverbank in Northern Italy. They finally found the tiny cold corpse of a child who was stolen from the arms of his parents for only one reason. Cold, hard cash. Some of the cops began to weep as uncontrollably as Baby Tommaso moments before he was bludgeoned. Three people have been charged in the death of Baby Tommaso.
Some day Italian inmates may administer prison justice to the child’s executioners. But in the meantime, I am left to wonder when did human life become so cheap? When did our planet descend into a moral ice age? Why can’t the sound of a shovel in Italy drown out the din of a burned-out Barbie doll in Canada? Does anyone really believe that the clubbing of seals won’t continue to draw more eyeballs than the clubbing of humans?
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