There is unfettered sadness in the world. Growing up, I remember being taught history as though the events of the past were in the past. When I learned about wars or genocides, I believed them to be a memory of long ago that would be impossible today. But that couldn't be farther from the truth. It's shocking really. If you think about it, nothing at all has changed in the world. There is still violence, rape, brutality, dishonesty, and barbarity. I just don't understand how it's possible.
As I searched for pictures from the 1940s for inspiration for my writing, I stumbled upon a collection of pictures from the Holocaust. One needn't even look at pictures of dead bodies to be shocked since the bodies of the people who were alive didn't look much different from their dead counterparts. Those poor poor people were so frail and impossibly thin. Their eyes were drained of all hopefulness as robust soldiers laughed and grimaced in the background. How could humanity allow such a thing? How could one see a pile of mangled corpses the size of a mountain and still believe that this was the right thing to do? I saw pictures of workers pushing corpses into ovens as though they were loaves of bread. Seeing this in pictures is bad enough, but the fact that there are still people alive who have witnessed this makes me realize just how recent the Holocaust was. It's not a thing of the distant past…no, it happened during my grandparents' lifetimes.
But that's just one event. I couldn't possibly recount the atrocious events like the Holocaust that have been and still are going on since even just the 2000s. I cannot begin to process the idea that people are still being crudely tortured as I write this. Personally, I don't even know the full extent of the tragedies of modern warfare. Honestly, it's a lot more difficult to look at contemporary war photographs than it is to look at the ones from World War II. The older ones are black and white and grainy--which filters part of the gruesomeness of the objects depicted. Today's pictures, however, are too detailed and the blood is simply too red for me to handle.
It saddens me to see how fragile human bodies are and how cruel other humans are to allow the meaningless slaughters of someone else's father, mother, son, daughter, lover, husband, friend, etc. Actually…it's not even that necessarily. When I think of it, if someone places another human being next to me (of whatever color, race, gender, creed, or belief system), just the fact that that human has a body like mine, a mind like mine, and the shared desire to live a life and find happiness, is enough to make me not want that person to be harmed. So how is it possible for people today to still bomb others, to stone young girls to death, to torture people, to decapitate innocent humanitarians, to end lives without so much as a flinch?
I think about that a lot because I find it to be one of the most difficult things to understand. Sure many of those involved might have fallen under some sort of mob mentality. But what about the principle evil-doers (so to speak)? I thought about this once in the context of bugs. Imagine the gnarliest bug you could think of. I'm not very bug-savvy, so I'll just propose the infamous example of grossness- the cockroach. Perhaps people capable of doing harm to others view those others as I view cockroaches. I know that cockroaches have some place in the world (as most creatures either do something or serve as a food supply to other creatures), but I'd rather not see them. I cringe when I see them anywhere, but if they're on my territory - I want them to be removed. Maybe that's how some people feel about others, they feel that they are like cockroaches that are to be exterminated. And, since they remove the idea of possessing a shared humanity by choosing to think of others as bugs, it makes it easier to inflict pain or eliminate those people. Some have the power to squash the cockroaches themselves. Others, however, (like me) cannot stand the experience of crushing a bug firsthand and, thus, appoint others to dispose of the intruding party for them.
My example surely does not adequately explain the mind of a mass-murderer - but it helps me to begin to fathom the possibility of having that mentality. It truly is distressing to think about, so for now I will leave it at that and maybe write about this more when I have other ideas that can be better articulated.
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