I'll take a shot. I saw this movie, "Running on Empty" on television, years ago. I was a lot younger and I have to say I felt sorry for the kid, and for the plight of the family. Now, I am not doing this as an attack, this is just an opinion coming up. As an adult and as I have become more conservative, I think that conservatism is a more difficult view to believe in.
For example, my thoughts on the death penalty would also apply to this movie family.
It is much easier to be against the death penalty than for it for these reasons. The criminal who has committed the murder that landed him on death row is still alive and in jail. People are very visual in relating to the world. They see an individual in jail, alone, among really bad people, isolated and facing death. When you see the profiles of these killers on the news it is easy to feel sympathy for their plight. I think as people, we put ourselves in their situation and we empathize with them. No one wants to be locked up, isolated, in danger from other inmates and so on. You can listen to the inmate showing regret and asking for forgiveness, and it reaches out to your human instinct to forgive when someone is sorry. You also have people telling you, forgive him because he/she is sorry, or killing them doesn't bring back the victim. Their lawyers argue for them, they seem like nice people now, and the thought of killing them is horrible.
This is where it is difficult to be a conservative. The victim is nowhere to be seen and cannot speak for themselves. Sure, you have relatives to describe them, and how much they miss them, but as I mentioned above, we are more visually oriented. We can actually see the prisoner and hear him say he is sorry. We will never be able to be at the actual scene of the crime. We will never be able to know what the victim experienced as well as we know what the still living prisoner is currently experiencing. The victim is almost non-existent. The human that committed the murder is not the human we are seeing now. The joy, or the emptyness of the killer as he committed his crimes is lost, especially over time. So it takes a real effort to stand up for the victim, to stand up for what you believe is justice. The person you are representing essentially no longer exists, so you need to work harder to follow through on your beliefs.
That is what this movie is like. This seems like a nice family. They seem to love their kids, and they are forced to live in hiding. It is easy to sympathize with them. It takes an act of conscious thought to remember their crime and how they are fleeing punishment. It is easy to like this family, it is harder to want to see them punished for what they did. Even at the end of the movie they are still running from taking responsibility for the person whose life they destroyed.
