On Human Cruelty

  I do not typically put my own journaling on this blog, but I think something I wrote last night might be posting. So here it is, mostly unedited.

I write here not because of what I think but because of what I feel. I just read an essay by John Green about bears. He talks about bearbaiting and bear hunting. And I thought, I just don't get human cruelty. Most of all being exposed to it even just in writing breaks my heart. It also makes me angry. I jut don't get it. How can so many people inflict physical and emotional pain on other people and other living things? The Nazis murdered six million Jews, but it wasn't the Nazi party that did it. Nazi ideology probably inspired it, but ideology didn't do it. Human beings did. Human beings systematically killed millions of other human beings as though that were a perfectly normal, acceptable, and moral thing to do. Under Stalin the KPSS [the Communist Party of the Soviet Union] murdered millions upon millions of people, but it wasn't the party that did it. It was ordinary Russian and other human beings who confiscated food from peasants so they would starve to death. Who spent eight hours a day shooting people in the back of the head. Who worked other people to death in the Gulag. And I just don't get it. Ordinary people from every nation on earth put on military uniforms, are trained to kill other human beings, then go kill them as though that were an ordinary, acceptable, and moral thing to do. It isn't, and I can't understand how so many people can fail to understand that it isn't. On an individual level spouses beat up their spouses. Men rape women and even little girls. People abuse animals and cause them immense suffering. People unload AR-15s into classrooms or crowds of people for no conceivable reason. Prison workers calmly put other human beings to death as though that were a moral thing to do. It isn't. Earlier today I read Jim Wallace's account of the two year old boy both of whose parents died protecting him from the Fourth of July gunman in Illinois. Some heroes returned to the fire zone to rescue him. As they carried him to safety he cried, "Shot. Shot Mommy. Shot Daddy." Reading that story brought me to tears Writing about it just now did too.

So why do we do it? How can we do it? Why doesn't the very thought of harming or killing another human being let alone millions of them reduce us to tears? Why do so few Christians understand and live by Jesus' teaching of nonviolence? When did forming up in armed ranks to go kill other people become a Christian thing to do? When did fire bombing Dresden and Tokyo and dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki become a moral, Christian thing to do? It isn't It can't be. It is the infliction of inconceivable suffering and death on other human beings. Calling them the enemy doesn't make torturing and killing them moral. We may make them our enemy. God makes them every bit as much God's people as we are. I just don't get it. It burdens my spirit. It breaks my heart. Why are we humans so cruel? How can we be so cruel? I don't understand it. I will go to my grave not understanding it. All I can do is cry Lord forgive! Lord have mercy! And that isn't enough. It never has been and never will be enough.

Why do I feel this way about human cruelty so much more strongly than most people do? Is it because I was bullied as a child? Is it because I take Jesus' teaching of nonviolence seriously? I have never personally experienced anything much like the cruelty I've described here. Even being bullied was nothing like what so many humans inflict on so many other humans. I grew up in a safe home. I've never really been personally unsafe. I have suffered pain some both physical and emotional, but other people's cruelty hasn't caused that pain. Is it a genetic disposition? Maybe. Is it a weakness? Many people would say yes. I don't think it is, but it makes me awfully vulnerable. I feel assaulted by all the bad news these days. Life must be easier with a hard heart than with a soft one. Hard hearts rule the world, and no cruelty is too vile for them to use doing it. I have so many questions and so few answers. So few answers.