I think the interesting thing is people like the Unabomber and the young student guy who commited that Virginia Tech Massacre are all too human.
I suspect for many people, they can both relate to these people and at the same time feel disgusted by them. I know I have mixed feelings. I really don't like people killing others intentionally unless as a last resort, but I don't know if I can always judge whether it really was these people's last resort.
You watch or read part of what these angered outcasts say and you agree with them. They're trying to change the world, criticising it because they aren't being respected or listened to and yet at the same time being human there's always a few things they come out with that make you roll over laughing. And I don't mean that in a demeaning way, I mean you're sort of just laughing at how they've got holes in their logic in the way most people do. Laughing at how bizarre people can be, how contradictory.
A lot of these terrorists, people think they're absolutely outrageous. But they might have themselves thought moments before what they did that they were terrible and yet maybe they just had a headache, had drunk too much, had read something that had rubbed them up the wrong way that knocked their equilibrium slightly out of skew.
Maybe if Unabomber had gone to the library on the day he was going to blow the building up and read some random book he never expected to look at or read, he could have had a completely different train of thought. He might have trained to become a ballet dancer before retiring in Hong Kong to instruct yoga to senior citizens by the sea.
12 Jan 2009, 10:25 am
