| | In response to Master Remba's post on the Alicia Ross killer case,
http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=GrobSMG [Sep 22, 2005]
here's my two cents on the nature of "monsters."
The killer is no doubt a monster. But monsters come in many guises, and not all of them are frightening to look at. Some are born monstrously deformed, and they grow ever less pleasing to the eyes as they age. But that is no more than misfortune, pure and simple. Ill formed as they are, they are not often ill natured. Many of them are meek and gentle souls. We call them monsters because they frighten us, but that reflects our failings, not theirs.
And then there are some men who grow to be monsters. They learn to be that way. That kind of monster can be recognized on sight. Their affliction is a wanton disregard for human life, born of too much hatred and bloodshed. Those men become rigid with hate, incapable of kindness or compassion. They see all but their own -- and sometimes even their own -- as enemies deserving death, and they are masters of spilling blood and spreading havoc. They are cold and pitiless, devoid of love, or mercy, or even hope, and that is their crippling misfortune. Life holds no value for them, not even their own, and nothing seems to them worth living for.
But yet another kind of monster walks among us, sharing our daily lives and giving us no sign, until it is too late, that they are deeply different from us. They are so different from the ruck of ordinary, honest men. They take the trust on which we live and turn it into poison.
Trust is not something we think about very often, but we depend on it for everything worthwhile. We all deal in trust; people's lives are founded on trust.
We form our own opinions of the folk we live among, the friends and neighbors and companions with whom we share our lives, and we trust them to behave in certain ways -- as they do us -- with honesty and dignity and respect for themselves and for their neighbours. And based upon that trust, that mutuality of trust and common interests, we make laws and rules to govern how we all live with one another. But these monsters I speak of now, monsters like the Alicia Ross killer, are governed by no laws, no rules. They are predators, wild beasts who prey upon honest, ordinary human beings as victims -- perceiving them and treating them as weaklings and helpless fools created solely to fulfill their needs. They have -- they know -- no honesty. Worse, these creatures have no understanding of what honesty is, and that, alone, makes them dangerous to all who cross their paths. They see no worth in trust, because they themselves have no belief in it. It is alien to their nature, and therefore they exploit the trust of other people as a fatal flaw.
By far the worst part of such beings, however, is that they quickly learn to keep their true natures hidden from the eyes and knowledge of others. They learn to ape the manners and behavior of others unlike themselves, behaving outwardly as they believe others think they ought to behave, and concealing their own monstrousness. Their entire existence is a lie. They deal in a kind of treachery that ordinary men cannot imagine, and that treachery grants them a power against which no one else can be prepared. This power is the power to deceive and to betray.
Someone might say, "but anyone can deceive anyone else." True, you can deceive someone without betraying him. Deceit is usually self-serving, but it need not be harmful to others. Betrayal, on the other hand, is always harmful. And when someone who has gained a high position of trust betrays that trust, its effect has the power of a nuclear bomb, smashing through everything within its blast radius because there are no barriers, no armor or defenses, to stop it. Its aftereffects would linger long after the "bomb" was triggered, haunting everybody who has been entrapped in this betrayal of trust.
|
| | Posted 9/23/2005 2:05 PM - 11 views - 4 comments
- recommend
  - recs0
- give stars
- votes0
- share
- email
 - sent0
|
