Greta is Great spelled wrong.

This would be a cool protest

This did not really happen but the problems and facts in it are true.

This is a paper written from a student photography major at DU. He was 20 years old when he wrote this. This paper was meant to accompany a project for his photography class to take a picture of something meaningful.

Sheila Porter. She started it all. I am writing this paper along with my project for this class. But I would like you to know that it was not me that put all the work in. Sheila Porter was who I took the picture of. She was the one who did something meaningful. She did it all. All this paper is meant to do is make it known to at least one other person in the world what she did.

She said that over her summer vacation she planned to go to Washington D.C. She had found some kind of public park jsut south of the white house and gotten the right permits to station herself there for the entire summer. She spent money she had saved since she was 6 years old on a costom made steel cage meant to look like a jail cell. She planned to have it shipped to that park and set up with her inside of it. She planned on staying in there for 60 days. Her mom was going with her to take her food and blankets and whatever she needed. She would only leave the cell to use the restroom in the nearby port-o-potty for visitors.

My first question was obviusly what would possibly provoke someone to do something like this. I went searching around her blog until I found the post that started it all.

The post included this word for word:

I recently watched an Oprah show about child molestors. They had some guy from the child exploitation foundation or something like that. They were talking about how only 1/3 child molesters don't register. If they get caught and have not been registered it is only a misdemeanor. The other 2/3 usually don't get very long in jail. They said this one guy in Virginia molested to 6 year olds and only spent 60 DAYS IN JAIL! And after that they sent him to a rehab center for another month and he had to register and he was free to go. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!?! He freaking raped two kids! Anyone who does something that horrible should be in prison for life.  No second chances.  No excuses.  60 days??? Thats not even a full summer vacation!  Sure we'd have to build a lot more prisons but I'm sure people would rather spend their tax dollars on that.  Especially when we've got so much of it going to stupid ear tags like lumber mills.  I bet most americans would even agree to pay MORE tax dollars if it means protecting the future generations.  I don't know how the government can look over things like this.  Child abuse and molestation is no longer a crime, it is an epidemic.  

This post shocked me.  So what if it was written by a high school freshman it was still amazing to me.  How could this be happening to our country?  Why wasn't anybody doing anything about it until now?  And why did the person who stood up and noticed was only just starting high school?!  What is wrong with this country.  The post went further to say that she beleived in the phrase from the Declaration of Independance that "those who have the ability to take action have the responsibility to take action".  It amazed me that since someone who had very little ability but realized that no one else would, took it upon herself to take action.  She was holding the most amazing protest I had ever heard of.  I hadn't actually heard of many protests but hers infatuated me.  She was representing the man who had been cut slack when she beleived no one who did something like that should get none.  She was stationing herself in the town where most of the government affairs are taken care of.  So, I figured I at least owed it to her to be at her protest.  I took the money I had been saving up and flew to Washington D.C. I was there the day they set up her cage with her inside it.  They used an extremely strong metal so no weirdo's could bother her at night.  All that was in there was a blanket and a pillow on the ground.  I met her and told her this story.  She seemed like a totally normal teenager like I remembered being.  She liked bands and thought dirty things were funny because she was in high school and from then on your mind is permanently in the gutter.  I took a picture and wished her the best.  Then I left.    

I kept track of her day to day journal from her blog that her mom had been working on.  She would write it down and her mom would copy it online.  One day there was no blog-journal.  I figured her mom had just gotten behind.  I watched the news that night.  On July 17th , 2007 about 2:30 in the morning, a strange man approached the makeshift jail cell and shot Sheila Porter once in the head.  She died almost instantly.  They knew all that because there was a video camera nearby for the visitors.  After that congress passed a law that every registered child molester and any future ones would spend life in jail.  It took an innocent child's life to finally spurr the protection of the chldren of america.  So that is my paper.  I just wanted to tell her story.