Smiling

Janis Sharp, Gary McKinnon's mom tweeted after the decision that Gary McKinnon said that he'd forgotten what it was like to feel happy. She said that for the first time in years, Gary awoke with no pain in his chest. Any doctor will tell you that anxiety is a killer, and Gary McKinnon has suffered through almost 11 years of it. It's my understanding that now Theresa May is coming under fire for freeing Gary. Mr. Eric Holder (who has now resigned) is one of the individuals with this belief, going so far as to not even take Theresa May's calls. Meanwhile, will Gary still be persecuted? This decision has yet to be made, from what I understand.

As Theresa May said, when reading her decision, "Mr. McKinnon has been accused of serious crimes." However, he has never (in my opinion) been the dangerous terrorist that he has been made out to be. I feel that it's wrong that some are now treating Theresa May terribly when they don't understand this truth. The very fact that Gary was under that much duress for that many years interfered with his human rights in itself. Now that a decision has been made, a decision that our commander and chief had said that we would respect, there are those in the US government that have been treating Theresa May with no respect whatsoever.

Our reputation does not need to be tarnished anymore. It seems in America, we've always been known for considering and standing up for a person's human rights and treating them fairly. Why then, in this case does this principle seem so skewed? In following McKinnon's case for approximately 7 months, I found little if any US coverage of McKinnon's story, aside from a few filler pieces saying that he was known as the biggest computer hacker of all time. The day following the UK decision, a Google search of Gary McKinnon gave me several articles from US newspapers... about how the biggest computer hacker of all time had been allowed to go free.

This is the angle that was all blown up like a balloon. Why NOW was Gary so well known here in the US? What about all those years before when his mother Janis was tirelessly fighting for his freedom? What about the "imprisonment" Gary suffered through not knowing what would happen to him? It seems to me that sometimes we try so hard to nail people for doing something wrong, that we ignore everything about the situation that's right. The US has always been the one who runs in and rescues such a person...not throws them under the bus, and then makes them out to be something they are not.

To Janis Sharp, none of the above matters like seeing her son smiling again.