Brenda Heist case symbolizes the era of walking away
Brenda Heist, 53, vanished in Feb. 2002 from Lititz, Pa. after dropping her two young children at school. She reappeared last week in Florida, when she turned herself in to police. She said she walked away from her family due to stress over finances. She has lived as a homeless person since she left. At left is Heist from her Pa. driver's license. On the right, as she looks today.
Posted: Sunday, May 5, 2013 10:30 am | Updated: 10:39 am, Sun May 5, 2013.
Posted on May 5, 2013
In February 2002, Brenda Heist dropped off her two young children at school in Lititz, Pa., and vanished. Years later, her husband, Lee, had a court declare her deceased. He remarried and he and the two children moved on with their lives. Then, last week, his dead wife reappeared.
She was in Florida living as a vagrant. She told police that she had abandoned her children after she was denied housing support as she and her husband agreed to divorce terms. She said she sat on a park bench in Lancaster and sobbed. Three homeless people in the park said she should run. Off she went.
The Associated Press news service, quoting Florida police, reported that Heist lived under bridges, panhandled and scrounged food from restaurant trash cans. Her mother said her decision to walk away from her children was “spur of the moment.”
Her two children are grown. Her son has graduated from college. Her daughter, Morgan, is a college freshman. She is not happy, and in short bursts of bitterness on Twitter, said her mother can “rot in hell” for walking away.
The resentment is understandable. It’s cruel what her mother did. But why judge unless we would be judged? After all, the present generation of Americans is characterized by abandoning responsibility. Things get tough, we get out. We live in the era of walking away.
Let us begin with the millions of American men who father children and then walk away from them. The consequences of this are well known. How many men in prison grew up without fathers? Most of them.
Then there is the immense burden heaped on the public to provide for these children whose fathers walked away, including the basic necessities of food, housing and health care.
We also walk away from our financial obligations, notably home mortgages. A decade ago, an American would do everything possible keep the family house from foreclosure, even if it meant giving up dining out, cigarettes and casino jaunts. No more. We walk away, leaving neighbors to deal with the blight of empty houses with unkempt grounds.
There is even a website to help you screw your banker by walking away from your house. It’s called, appropriately, YouWalkAway.com. It specializes in advising homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages, but who can still afford to make the payments, to do a “strategic default.” It is a way of sticking the rest of us with the costs of bank bailouts made necessary by failure to meet one’s financial obligations.
For decades, millions of Americans have been walking away from perfectly good marriages. It used to be that infidelity or abuse was what broke up marriages. Thanks to no-fault divorce, we can renege on vows and walk away with fewer complications than a married couple could 50 years ago. That’s progress, I guess.
We walk away from credit card debt by defaulting. We walk away from work by taking unemployment for a 99-week ride, then switching over to Social Security disability. Disability claims in the U.S. have jumped by 2 million since 2009, and are at a record 8.9 million. Well, it beats stocking shelves at Walmart.
With college tuition debt at $1 trillion, my guess is that millions of Americans, following their parents lead, will walk away from repaying college loans, sticking it to the rest of us.
You may wonder how Brenda Heist could abandon her kids. But that’s her business, and at least Lee Heist did not toss the responsibility of raising his kids and paying the mortgage to the rest of us. A lot of Americans, happily pursuing their own interests, can’t say the same.
J.D. Mullane can be reached at 215-949-5745 or at jmullane@phillyburbs.com. Twitter @jdmullane.
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