Adolf with Helga Goebbels
A monstrous person or a person who is a monster?
It is too easy and too simple to write off people like this as just pure evil, to allow them to be separated from that human part of them. We want to disassociate ourselves from such people out of fear which is natural. It makes us separate from them. It defines us as human and them as evil.
But in that separation we come to falsely believe that there are no monsters among us. That all ‘humans’ know the difference between right and wrong. In this division and through the isolation of ‘evil’ we become complacent.
We are aware that we are capable of acceptance and compassion and because of that awareness, we allow other feelings and notions to fester. We allow prejudice, racism, and even hatred to be a part of our human lives. We think that it is okay because we know, in earnest, that WE are good and THEY are evil. we believe falsely that the monsters of the world will be easy to identify and easy to stop.
But the problem is that the monsters are only identifiable AFTER they have done their monstrous things and those events and acts have been judged as such.
So, we blithely hum along in our lives, constantly surprised by the hideous creatures that pop up in our midst. The genocidal maniacs, the slaughtering hordes, the mass murderers, the rapists, and child killers.
And when they do appear we continually ostracize them as ‘evil’ and cast them out. Execute them, drive them away, we banish them from our world even though they were a part of our world. They were a product of our world. They were people who lived among us.
They had jobs, they bought groceries, they smiled and laughed with small children on the boardwalk.
via Tumblr http://thenelsontwins.tumblr.com/post/52003925426
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