Beyond My Ken

Inspirational song: Why (Annie Lennox)

No aspect of human nature intrigues me and baffles me as much as motive. I spend most of my life trying to understand why people act the way they do, and for all that I speculate and attempt to divine why, I don't think I am any closer to figuring it out than when I started decades ago. It's the only thing I ever want to know, and the question is so difficult, it's one I can't even always answer for my own self. It is the ultimate question, the one that all of us have been asking for hundreds of thousands of years. Why? How is it possible that we still can't answer it?

I and most of my friends and family have run across tricksters along the paths of our lives. We've all been baffled by people who want to take advantage of our good natures, our generosity, our trust. I've known people who have stolen money or belongings from me, who have pretended to have grave illnesses to gain attention and sympathy, who have willfully damaged my property, and who have lied to me--or about me--for the sake of lying. I cannot, for the life of me, get inside their heads, and understand how they can do any of that. What is missing from someone who is capable of that level of disrespect? At some level, I do understand that sociopaths exist, people who have no concept of the suffering of others, or even truly the humanity of others. But knowing they are out there, and imagining myself with that lack of empathy are entirely different things. I haven't led an entirely blameless life, obviously, but I don't think I am one of those people who can blithely take and never give, or dole out pain and not be hurt as well by my own actions.

I left the television on after the news, and just let it run, as I do most nights. There was a special presentation of the ceremonies in Normandy today, on the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. I can remember being a young girl, when we were living in Germany, traveling with my parents to a cemetery that was just rows and rows of white crosses, and not understanding where we were or why we were there. It's possible that my parents tried to explain it to me, but at six or seven years old, it didn't make sense. For years after that, I wondered where that cemetery was, and couldn't come up with a good answer for it. It was so outside of my concept of the world that I couldn't process it. I had a similar reaction to when my parents took us on a tour of the concentration camp at Dachau. It was so frightening and confusing to me that I was overwhelmed. At that age, I was almost more scared by the pictures of the mass graves, not because they were dead people, but because they were naked dead people. It was more than I could process, that such atrocities were real, historical facts. I could not put those two things together, that the one was necessary to stop the other. I don't get it, being able to turn off all of your feelings, to create such a sense of people as "other" that you forget they are people at all. No, it doesn't always end up like it did 70+ years ago, but that's where it starts, being so removed from empathy.

Oh, hell. Maybe Bill and Ted offered the best advice of all. Be excellent to each other. Why isn't that enough?

No pictures.