EJ MONTINI

Has Kayla Mueller already become Kayla Who?

EJ Montini
opinion columnist
Scene from Prescott earlier this year.

After all these years on the job I know I'm being set up for a smack down when a caller begins the conversation, as this one did, with, "You must be very proud."

She paused.

"Because of you and the media's obsession with tabloid sensations like (Jodi) Arias and (Sheriff Joe) Arpaio, or that woman who left her kids in the car and got all that money (Shanesha Taylor), or all the stupid politicians you guys write about, the world forgot all about Kayla Mueller."

Before I could answer her she hung up.

Which was a good thing, because I really don't have a good answer.

Three months ago Kayla Mueller's life and death, her story, and our reaction to her story, dominated the news.

Our attention for a brief time was focused on a young woman who mixed altruism with a sense of adventure, a 26-year-old aid worker from Prescott, an idealist, a world changer, who was kidnapped by members of the Islamic State (ISIS) in August 2013.

The group said Mueller was killed in a Jordanian air strike. U.S. officials aren't sure about that, although she was confirmed dead in February.

Mueller and her Syrian boyfriend were taken hostage after leaving a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Aleppo, Syria. The boyfriend was later released.

Now, following a raid by U.S. soldiers that killed an ISIS leader, officials are looking into the possibility that the terrorist leader and his wife might have held Mueller captive for a time.

And so Kayla Mueller's name is in the news again.

And I'd guess, as the caller suggested, there are some folks among us who had forgotten Kayla, or who didn't recognize her name until they heard or read the back story and then said, "Oh, yeah, her."

This was a young woman who spoke of her experience visiting Syrian refugee camps in 2013 at the Prescott Kiwanis Club where her father is a member. In an article for that town's Daily Courier she's quoted as saying, "For as long as I live, I will not let this suffering be normal, something we just accept. It's important to stop and realize what we have, why we have it and how privileged we are. And from that place, start caring and get a lot done."

We admire that type of idealism and commitment.

But that's not us.

We have jobs and families and day stress over work or money or health or relationships or mortgages or cars or pets or school.

Sometimes the stories that distract us involve a person like Kayla, who spent her young adulthood trying to make the world a better place;

But we move on. Quickly.

Kayla Mueller

Most often to subjects like Arpaio or Arias or Shanesha, or llamas running loose in Sun City, or whether a dress in a photograph is blue and black or white and gold.

It's not the same for Kayla's family and friends, of course.

They thought of her every day since her capture in 2013 and they've thought of her every day since she was declared dead. It will be that way for them, every day, forever, whether the media mentions her name again or not.

Besides, that's not why she did what she did.

Most of us had never heard of Kayla until the terrorists holding her captive announced that she had been killed. She set about saving the world while under the public radar, as do most other aid workers and volunteers same thing.

I mentioned the reader's angry phone call to a person I know who also works in blissful anonymity trying to save the world.

She told me, "The shocking thing isn't that people 'forgot' Kayla Muller. The shocking thing is that we got to know her at all."