In 1993, the couple gave birth to another daughter, Annette, named after mom. ![]() Marcia was returned to the Brights, but things only grew darker as the years passed. The older girl from his previous relationship never returned, which leads us to believe she’d been the one suffering the brunt of the violence, and baby Marcia’s life probably would’ve been much different if she’d remained in the system, but she didn’t – likely due to child welfare’s predilection for keeping kids with their biological mother at any cost. It was the first time authorities would take kids off John Bright, but it wouldn’t be the last. Acting on complaints of abuse, child services removed both children from the Bright home after John confessed to getting too physical with a belt. Navy and serving in California, along with his wife Annette, their infant daughter Marcia, and another unnamed daughter from another woman. In 1989, John Bright was enlisted in the U.S. Her saga begins with a guy who reportedly wasn’t exercising much good judgment in his life. This story has only one hero and she’s long dead. No opinion will ever matter or make it better or bring her back, so we’ll stick to the facts because they’re all we need. As if there could ever be a reason, or even an explanation, for a thing so evil. It’s a testament to the idea that our scariest monsters are the real ones, and that sometimes the very people assigned to protect and nurture a child are the ones who feed it to the wolves, and for no good reason. But in 2012, she exists only as a photograph, a memory, a campfire story and a cautionary tale. Annette Bright would’ve been eighteen today. To tell this story is to tell it all, and to flinch in the task would be the greatest disservice to a life taken way too soon. It ain’t pretty, so if such things linger in your psyche to disturb and haunt for longer than is tolerable, you should read no further. Anything but the facts and records is heresy, but the facts are easy to find and the chronology easy to follow. 8-year-old Annette Bright certainly didn’t deserve what happened to her, but when we lay out all we know, the wheels of her fate were set in motion years before she would meet Charles Koschalk. And sometimes the purest among us aren’t even given a chance. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Here in the land of the free, the home of the brave, the post-everything wild west, the good guys don’t always win. Well, iFeel sick, how about you? The scariest monsters are the real ones Morality, spirit, soul, and basic truth are all late to the finish line when there’s a fast buck to be made. Environmental pollution, government corruption, corporate greed, dwindling education resources, healthcare in crisis, skyrocketing street crime, rampant domestic abuse, and a frighteningly apathetic consumer culture that seems content to let the once-great American dream swirl right down the drain, so long as it can get an ironic tee and viral video out of it to cash in 15 minutes of internet fame. One glance at the American landscape of 2012 reveals a sad state of affairs and some glaringly inescapable truths. And so, as Rome also taught us, in the fruit of this brave new world lay also the seeds of its ruin. ![]() Indeed, these were mighty days for a mighty land, when the unadventurous had no recourse but to get the hell out of the way, shut up and sit down, while pioneers and forefathers carved their names in stone and steel, building the United States of America brick-by-brick on blood, sweat, tears and guts…and maybe a little back-stabbing, double-dealing, glad-handing and bullying too, but hey, in matters of history the end usually justified the means. The rails revolutionised travel and aided the rise of an Industrial Age that, pro or con, saw America become arguably the mightiest superpower in recorded history. In those dawning days, long before jet planes and the internet were but mere afterthoughts, it was the rails that stitched together our country’s rolling hills, sprawling flatlands, snow-capped mountains and sweltering deserts. After the Pony Express, the railways were perhaps the most significant single thing that helped shape our young nation into the force that it would quickly become.
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