I am thinking about this. In one sense, true. How we see is what we see. But you know elizabethanne, just lately, I am seeing things differently. I can see...hmmm. I can see the wrongness, always with the same bias toward exclusion and ridicule and contempt, in the choices my sister or my mother made and continue to make.
Always with that same bias, whether it is employed against family or friends.
What if it really is true that there are people who will hurt us if they can.
And of course, that is true. All that is necessary is dehumanization of the victim. Which is what occurs in war.
We comfort ourselves by assuring ourselves that the capacity for evil lives in every heart...but maybe that kind of comfort was only required in the first place because we suspect that there are some hearts where a kind of lonely heartlessness is the preferred modus operendi?
Generations of Roman rulers or Romanov czars or English kings who were kind and good...and sprung from the same genetic line, the insanity of a Cesar, a Peter, a Henry VIII.
Just as we are sprung of the same genetic lines as our hurtful, so impossible to understand, relatives.
Or maybe we are the ones who are impractical, and they are simply pragmatic realists.
Cedar
