Why I care about James Kim (and why you should too)

"Why do you care about James Kim?"

Somebody asked this on a bulletin board I frequent. It's a valid--if incredibly insensitive--question, I think, considering how many people die every day. This is, more or less, how I answered:

• I've met his wife a few times. I shop at her store in the Haight, it's just blocks from me. I've had a few conversations with her. She's helped me pick out a present for my wife Harper. She's nice.
  
• She's Harper's age. He's mine.
• He's a colleague, we're both tech journalists in a small insular community.
• Harper and I like to do the same kinds of things his family apparently does. We were traveling through Grant's Pass in September. It snowed on us unexpectedly in Oregon. Those kind of things make me think "there but for the grace of God go I"
• You want to root for him, especially after his family was found alive. It gives you hope that he might be. Plus, you read the things that he did. That they did. You hope you would be so brave. Or at least, I do.
  
• Say what you will about gentrification, but when her shop opened up in the lower Haight a few years ago, there were no boutiques there. It was there even before the pot clubs, as I recall. It took guts to open. I admire that.
• He was a father and a husband with two small children. You feel for his wife. You feel for his kids.
• He's a human being. He had hopes and dreams and fears like all of us. It's horrible to think of him cold and alone in the snowy wilderness. You wanted him to be okay. You want everyone to be okay.
  

On the way to lunch, I walked right by her shop. There were news crews there, and two boquets of flowers. On the way home, the news crews were gone, and now there were three boquets. There is a flower store directly across the street. I wanted to leave a fourth, but I didn't have the guts to walk in the store and act like a decent human being.