Wow, that was quite a lot of cryptic build-up. It’s basically a story about conman/drug guy interwoven with biographical information and anecdotes about how this impacted his family.
“You can run,” I guess maybe in the context of “You can run but you can’t hide” is not really touched upon too much. I mean it doesn’t have a particular connection to this story, any more than any other story about a fugitive.
Yeah — but includes a fun cameo from a famous 90s TV dad.
Yup. A big yawn. It seems like it ought to deep and insightful, but is, as you say, "basically a story about conman/drug guy interwoven with biographical information and anecdotes about how this impacted his family". There's no connection between the two parts that goes deeper that "they knew each other once, but did they really know each other?". It'd be Hallmark, but the parents aren't sympathetic enough.
The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself. -- Ezekiel 18:20
That was aspirational around 590 BC when written, and still is. To isolate children from the iniquity of the parent would require the dissolution of the family.
You can't quote that without also quoting:
Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation. -- Exodus 34:7
My favorite (dys|u)topian setting; universal child removal to robo-nurseries, gets closer to implementable every day.
They more or less did that during the bombing of London, children were evacuated to foster families in the countryside en masse. Luckily they came to terms with the fact that this was an insanely traumatic experience pretty quickly and reverted. It's literally less traumatic for a child to be in an active war zone than to be separated from their parents.
Unless the child is killed in said active war zone, which was the maximally traumatic outcome they were trying to avoid. Some evacuation was reverted, but there were also later waves; I don't think it was clear that it was overall the wrong thing given the very possible outcomes of heavier bombing or even invasion.
Does this apply to babies separated at birth though?
The trauma shifts forward in time, like debt.
And as many adoptive parents know, that doesn’t go so easily.
On the subject of crime and that web site, I thought this story was quite fascinating:
https://magazine.atavist.com/2019/outlaw-country-klamath-cou...
There are a lot of those bits of land throughout the west that have been, for whatever reason, subdivided enough to make them very cheap plots of land in remote areas. They tend to attract a lot of very random people.
There's an area like that near where I live in Bend, Oregon where some guy called in to the Sheriff's department worried about his brother. The deputies decided to visit the next day because it was winter and already dark. Reading that, I had a record scratch moment where I was going "wait, the sheriff's deputy wouldn't visit the area after dark - holy crap".