The Children of War: One M&M in Ten Thousand

Can you even imagine your son hating you so much that he tries to kill you? How much hate would have to live inside a person to want this?

Fathers – you can be so much with so little…

Imagine hating a person that you’ve never met, and have no knowledge of, but hating them so much you want them dead and are willing to be – the perpetrator?

Imagine a society that is so hell-bent in lying and deception, that they will tell you a staged story of why you have crossed that moral and ethical line knowing it is false and pretending it to be true?  I can’t imagine such a mind that rationalizes such lies,  I can’t imagine the mind of such a person. I can’t imagine the emptiness of care. I can’t imagine such absolute hatred that it consumes.  I can’t imagine they sleep…

And yet, I have siblings and a father and grandfather and great, and great great and so on – that have all experienced this absolute absorbing hate. In war. Can a person that is so carnaged in that cavernous gulf of emotion and life ever really ‘get better’? At what point does the mind change to the point that it can’t be ‘fixed’?

Sometimes I think that there is just a switch some place in the brains of these terrorists and others consumed with hate, a switch that if God wanted, he could flip and these people would no longer be evil.  They would lay down their swords, their AK-47’s, their deboning fillet knives and say – enough.  What’s the point?

Perhaps the idea comes from the most simple of examples – down syndrome. A part of the brain is clustered and emphasized, while another part is clouded and gray. The clouded and gray matter house the hatred and lying and deception genetic, while the cluster emphasizes a simplistically full heart that overflows, brimming with nothing but purity and goodness! Amazing! So, of course, there is a switch somewhere that causes a person to lop heads, blow up crowds of innocent children, and maim thousands upon thousands – for a self, a narcissistic self that cares for nothing but – self.  While there is another switch that allows a person to be engulfed in an aura of glorified sweetness.

So what makes two people go opposite directions? One evil – one good?

Is it really possible that it is a brain anomaly that makes one more evil? Could there be a dyke, a switch, a trigger that could be set into the ‘on’ position, allowing them to be good people? And if something happens to flip the switch off, the brain spirals into an evil place.

The Fix: It wouldn’t be a lobotomy. It would be a restoration of a switch that was triggered by events beyond your control during childhood. The switch would ‘reset’ like the red button in your kitchen that resets rooms of power overload and failure.

Imagine the children coming out of Syria? Imagine what is in their dreams? Where do their thoughts reside? What is their suppressed emotional level? How do they view – life? You can’t ignore them. You can’t pretend they are just fine. They are not. And a new generation will grow that is rooted in terror and a disregard for life. Has their ‘switch’ been turned off? Did the overload of destruction and devastation cause the switch to simply flip to the off position? Probably.

This is the generation we support in Syria – in the Middle East – in Africa… Are we really so immune? So disconnected? So absorbed in self? We can’t see?

Because, while there may be ten poisoned M&M’s in the bowl amongst ten thousand, there may be a child M&M, a girl, 4, standing in the midst of bombs, her hair splayed with dirt, her face splattered with tears and terror, and all around the world is fire, noise, and chaos. And I think there are a fair number of firemen, policemen, and military that would risk the ten amongst the ten thousand – for the one.