Sympathy for the Devil

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.