Friday Morning: Cruelty and Death

The theme for the day is cruelty and death.

I should explain, first of all, an odd phenomenon in my life:  occasionally, seemingly serendipitously, events and reading materials, chance meetings and songs on the radio, all seem to organize themselves around a particular theme, chosen randomly, by whatever gods are at work in the universe, to direct my attention toward that theme.  Something from my inner psyche, undoubtedly, is directing my attention to that which it demands I consider. 

I began by opening my email of headlines from the Boston Globe and read the story of a woman murdered on Cape Cod.  Okay.  Then I read a review of the new movie, Fast Food Nation.  The final paragraph of the movie describes a scene on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse.  This reminds me of a book I read recently, Slaughterhouse, which was a relentlessly grueling description of the process by which our meat goes from living animal to packaged prime.  That book was so horrible that I had to put it down periodically to cry or throw up.  The fact that I still manage to eat meat products is a testament to the human mind's amazing ability to dwell in denial, to hold fast to whatever beliefs help us sleep at night and to ignore everything else.

Speaking of which, how about that Iraq war, huh?  One hundred and fifty Iraqis kidnapped yesterday.  First thought:  thank God they weren't Americans.  But the second thought crowds that out:  these were ordinary people at work on an ordinary day.  The 150 number is no match for the 3000 killed on 9/11 but really, for the families of those hostages, this is their own personal 9/11 – their loved one went to work and didn't return, and despite what we'd like to tell ourselves, Iraqis do love their children as much as we do, and grieve from them every bit as profoundly.   Whether you are an American soldier being tortured by fundamentalist extremists or an ordinary Iraqi caught in the crossfire of this sectarian insanity, horror is horror, human pain is human pain, and it's all hideous, the fact that we humans can do this to one another.

I remember a story I heard on the radio yesterday.  It was a tale about a small town in Wyoming, where the owners of a small-town diner adopted a wild turkey who showed up one day, foraging for food.  They fed it and were friendly to it.  The turkey eventually overcame its fear of humans and came daily to meet with his human friends, even sitting on their front porch and calling them to come out in the morning.  The customers of the small diner became used to the turkey; he was a fixture in this small town's life, earning a mention or two in the local newspaper.  And then one day, turkey hunting season opened, and a guy with a shotgun drove up to the diner and shot the turkey.   Apparently the guy was a really lousy shot, because even shooting a tame turkey at close range, he managed to bungle the job:  a witness reported that the turkey was struggling as the man shoved him into his truck and drove away.

It all leaves me baffled.  I cannot explain any of it, how we manage to be so incredibly cruel to one another and to weaker beings.  What mechanism is it that allows us to separate ourselves from one another so profoundly that we can inflict gratuitous pain –  not for survival, not for self-protection, but for the fulfillment of intellectual ideals or the gratification of psychological needs?  I can't make any sense of it, but today, the horror of it overwhelms me.  Here at work, I put my head down on my computer keyboard and cry.