There are 8 billion people on the planet right now.
Some of them are 2 years old. Some are 102 years old.
But count on this. Every person has a story. Not just one story. But days, and weeks, and months, and years of stories.
We only come across a small circle of them. A tiny, tiny, itty-bitty circle of them.
This amazes me because there is so much that we don’t know.
Take this story, which I happened across the other day. I was eight years old when it happened, living in Dayton, Ohio. So how could I possibly know that a wealthy heiress was murdered by her son on November 17, 1972? In London, England.
I couldn’t know. Not without telepathy. Or perhaps, Walter Cronkite.
Anyway, a wealthy socialite named Barbara Baekeland was stabbed to death with a kitchen knife by her 25-year-old son, Antony. On that day. And it happened in her London penthouse. It would seem he must have been upset with her about something or another. But get this. When the police arrived at the scene, Antony was calmly placing a telephone order for Chinese food. I wonder what he got. Moo Goo Gai Pan?
The thing of it is. Most of us had Bakelite in all our homes in some form or another. It was an early plastic product. That’s one connection here.
Antony’s great-grandfather, Leo Baekeland, acquired his family’s fortune with the creation of Bakelite.
So yes. Leo was the patriarch of the money empire. And sure. They were financially successful. But the family was far from stable.
Like this, Leo’s grandson Brooks was a decadent adventurer. He also said he was a writer, but he hardly ever put pen to paper. Brooks was married to a woman named Barbara. She was a model and would-be Hollywood starlet but she came with all sorts of her own problems. She attempted suicide several times. And Barbara was reportedly so deeply distressed by her son Antony’s homosexuality that she attempted to seduce him as a “cure.”
To top it all off, Antony displayed signs of schizophrenia. But his father (Brooks) called psychiatry “professionally amoral” and refused to pay for treatment.
But back to Barbara and Antony. Their turbulent mother-son relationship worried her friends. For good reason. Antony’s erratic behavior was cause for concern because, over the years, the two had several threatening arguments involving knives.
Well. Something must have happened on that particular day, I’ll tell you. Maybe she looked at him wrong. Maybe she tried something. Who knows. But whatever it was pushed him over the edge to stab her fatally. And that was the end of Barbara.
After the murder, Antony was institutionalized at Broadmoor until a bureaucratic mistake resulted in his release in July 1980.
Yes. Some sort of mistake set him free.
He then relocated to New York City, where he lived with his grandmother for a short time until he beat and stabbed her in 1980. Miraculously, she survived.
And then? Antony was sent to Riker’s Island, where he killed himself by suffocation on March 21, 1981.
So. As you see. A story. From afar. Involving at least five different people’s lives directly. But the branching effects would go out from there. And now, after all these years, the story is reaching you and I.
But just think of the enormity of this. Every person you see today will have a million different connections throughout their lives, spinning off in millions of directions. I guess, then, it is no wonder that six degrees of separation is true. We are here, sharing this planet, and have been for millions of years. It is all connected. Somehow.
We are all connected. Somehow.
It is a shame we can’t remember this more often.
Maybe then the world would be a more compassionate place.
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“We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson
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“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.” — Herman Melville
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“Compassion is the ultimate expression of your highest self.” — Russell Simmons
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Bakelite. The murder. The connections.
