One of my cross country stops last week was Laramie, Wyoming, where 25 years ago Matthew Shepard was brutally beaten and left to die in the freezing cold, tied to a fence. The next morning a passing bicyclist had initially taken him to be a scarecrow, before calling for assistance. But of course it was too late.
The fence is gone, and there are no markers or indication of what happened there, except a few ‘private property/no trespassing’ signs that presumably were meant to deter anyone coming to remember and reflect on Matthew’s death. The University of Wyoming, where Matthew was a student, could barely muster the motivation to slap a small brass plaque onto one of their nondescript benches in front of the humanities building, as a begrudging memorial which even now is covered in flowers, mementos and notes to him.
The world is full of hate, no doubt, and untold scores of lives are prematurely, senselessly, violently ended every year because of hate. But I remember Matthew’s death when it happened, and I remember how closer to home it felt. And it almost felt as raw standing there, 25 years later.
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