I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
The news always casts these people that do horrendous things as horrible people
I can understand why
But it’s just too one dimensional
We are all capable of such atrocities
That most of us don’t do them speaks more to where our life is
Than where our morality is
Because given the right circumstances we could have maybe done the same thing
Of course this doesn’t mean I am advocating more sympathy for the offender than the victim
That would be asinine and ruthlessly cruel
It just means that I have compassion for the perpetrators as well
Obviously they are coming from a fucked up place.
I think of mother’s who abandon their kids
Fathers that kill their entire families
On and on and on
And I wonder
What kind of support system did these people have?
What kind of childhood?
What kinds of burdens were they facing?
What are the demons they were carrying deep inside?
It’s not excusable
It’s not alright
It’s not allowable
But it tugs at my heart that people are so broken inside
That these things become acceptable to them
Or even desirable
I don’t know if statistically we are more violent towards each other now
I don’t know if crime has gotten worse over the last decades, centuries, millennia
I dare say there are just more of us
More closely confined
And with information more readily available
I dare say as a world our psyche is definitely not in a better place
Our morality has not improved
But has it gotten worse?
I personally don’t necessarily think it has really
But that is not the point either way
The point is
How can we all judge when we aren’t out making it better
I say no one has a right to judge period
But I suppose if you are in the trenches shoeveling out the dirt
You’re allowed an opinion of how it looks down there.
