The tip of the iceberg

I went to see the wounded boy in the hospital bed He knew not who had shot him nor why they wished him dead. His cousins sat nearby; I asked them for a clue They proceeded to tell me all they knew. "He flew in from Spain, wanted to go to MIT. First, he seemed sane, then he sounded crazy Told us he was called names by men who looked grim We knew that was impossible, nobody here knew him." "We called his folks in Madrid with our concern They said he had no madness they could discern We took him to the tourist sights, he seemed rational then And we certainly didn't see name-calling from rough men." I pondered over old crimes, the gangs audacious and bold Tren Aragua and MS-13, their hearts so hard and cold. I gazed upon the injured face; a flicker crossed my mind, He looked like Pablo Escalero, the cruelest of their kind. Pablo was supposed to be released in a month or two A mistaken identity, that was it! that profile was the clue. We followed up and wiretaps confirmed my guess Caught the perp, for a plea bargain he was willing to confess I told the cousins that you can't rule out something rare Probable is better, but don't shoehorn a circle in a square. For when that happens, you play a lazy man's game If fear of thinking big misses real threats, that's the real shame. History is full of pent-up forces that suddenly burst on the scene Take us unaware, like a sudden bad dream Sometimes the warnings are scattered or subjective Before the inescapable shows our skepticism was defective. Being called names may not mean you are a bad man's double But life is sometimes like this and that's when filtering leads to trouble. An Eskimo in a kayak sees the iceberg's tip The Titanic sails right into destiny's grip. Eye-witness testimony can be crazy, and mundane reasons are usually true But sometimes it's all we have and we have to run with the clue. Big dangers can grow slowly, mostly out of sight There can be only a few indicators that shed light Criminals develop new weapons, not all for violence and death They have drugs that affect your brain, like the one named 'devil's breath'. A.I. can be used for good, but is already used for bad You can imagine how a victim of a new tech might be thought mad. Now the story of Pablo is fiction, reality might not work quite that way But it reflects experiences I've had, a diagnose that led police astray FBI agent Ken Williams saw Arabs in Phoenix wanting to fly passenger planes His warnings disregarded, until skyscrapers were consumed in flames. The little can reflect the big, the tiny symptom the raging disease. Don't overlook the trees for the forest, or the forest for the trees.