It's the Devil in Me (part 2)

I was reading the paper just yesterday and read a summary of that hostage stake out in a Russian kindergarten. What I read filled me with a profound sense of despair; for all my bold posturings about Television being the 'sickness that is ripping apart the western world' it seems there is a far greater sickness that lurks in the human psyche. These soldiers had taken hostage children and parents and then proceeded to blow them all up when their impossible demands weren't met. It stuns me that the same species that brought forth Monet and Rembrandt could also bring forth such insatiable evil. It's the same species that brought forth you and me.

I think why it really got me was that I just expected it to turn out okay. But it really didn't; it turned out about as badly as it possibly could have. The irony of course is that despite that fact that the 'world is shrinking' and we're 'all part of the global village' there was absolutely nothing any one of us could do about it.

Are we all capable of doing such horrific things? Is it just a part of our nature along with soccer and sculpture, Pokemon and poetry? Everything in me cries out that this surly can't be the case, that we are innately good and it is only in some twisted, mutated back-water of our gene pool that such disastrous tendencies exist. I find however that history does not support my view; the bloody butchering of innocents has been the human race's almost constant companion over the centuries and I would be hard pressed, when reading the almanacs of human tragedy and triumph to assert that the beauty has outweighed the pain.

The only hope I fear lies in the minutiae of individual existence, the smile on a small child’s face at a foolish game, old couples still holding hands after decades together, people at airports, a teenagers first painful crush or the comfort that only old friends can give. Perhaps there is even hope in my silly heart bleeding for those poor mums and dads in Russia. However, even here I find corruption in the stupid lies I've told out of insecurity or the people trodden on to get ahead, and I'm left with the feeling that we are constantly on a knife edge, poised between the good we could do and the bad we are so capable of. Surely the only question that remains is which one I will choose today? The problem is I sense another rather more cynical one: how long will this passion last? How long until it is just a little too hard and a little too costly to keep doing the good? Hear at last, I may have found ‘the devil in me’.