Sometimes I'm almost normal

Anyone who knows me will tell you how absurd the title of this post is. Normal? Me? Looking around at some of the other fine examples of humanity to be found on this planet, I begin to wonder. Okay maybe I’m strange but for the most part, harmless. I can honestly say that I have never gone out of my way to intentionally hurt anyone. Even when I drove a cab I never bothered ripping any of my passengers off. Over the years I have crossed paths with individuals that didn’t seem to have even the limited moral compass I do. Then there were the others, the ones who actually get some kind of sick pleasure out of hurting others.

These are the ones I do not understand. Recently a young man escaped such a situation and his story was all over the news. Someone had been torturing him. Not to gain information as in the official non-torture water-boarding at Gitmo. No, this was torture for pleasure. Someone enjoyed inflicting pain on this boy. Why? I have no idea. Watching it though, I couldn’t help wondering how many of the guards in the World War II concentration camps were there because they enjoyed the work. What part of mankind takes pleasure in acts such as these? Is it there in all of us or only a few? Why are some of us better at suppressing it than others? These are question I have no answer for. If there is some part of me that could take pleasure in hurting others I am eternally grateful it has never surfaced.

That is not to say I have not hurt others. I have. By oversight, by cowardice, you name it. I’ve let others down, we all have. A while back I watched a rather unusual movie called The Martian Child based on a story by David Gerrold. One line stood out. One of the characters turns to the other and says, “Why can’t you be who we want you to be?” That one question sums up a lot of the hopes and aspirations of the human race. Each of us has an image of what we want other peopleto be. Sometimes they live up to it, sometimes they don’t. When they don’t, we’re like the character in the movie, disappointed and puzzled and whether we voice it or not, asking the same question.

I have disappointed others just as they have me, usually because I could not be who they wanted me to be just as they could never be who I wanted them to be. We can only be who we are. It has taken me a lot of years to come to terms with who I am. Accepting others for who they are is more difficult but I'm working on it.