| It's interesting to see sometimes just how cruel
people can be to each other. The human being has devised
many ways to make other human beings suffer, both
physically and mentally. One night when I was in Florence,
Italy, I went to an exhibit at which they had set up a huge collection of medieval
tools of torture. Until I went to that exhibit, torture
and cruelty had been something I had heard of, something
that I had read about, something very far away from me. The exhibit, though, was awful.
The things that human
beings had done to each other on a regular basis, often
in the name of God or of the state, made me feel as if I
had been exposed to evil, as if I had seen something that
I shouldn't have seen because it shouldn't have existed.
There are those who claim
that we all have cruelty inside of us, that we all have the potential
for cruelty, and that if circumstances were to be just right, we would
all see just how cruel we can be to other human beings. I don't
agree. I believe that cruelty is a symptom, usually of many
different factors put together--fear, dissatisfaction with self,
inability to love and/or be loved, lack of confidence, inability to
relate to others, loneliness--you name it; the list can go on and
on. But cruelty is a symptom, a sign that something is wrong
spiritually and emotionally in a person, and it's impossible to
address the cruelty without addressing the other issues.
Would you put a band-aid
on a lesion caused by a sickness without treating the sickness
itself? Many people do just this--six months in jail or in
juvenile detention, a few hundred hours of community service. Others
ignore something like cruelty and hope it will go away. Still
others avoid the cruel people (this is how I deal with cruelty, and
I've noticed that it's particularly ineffective).
Cruelty is a sign that a
person is leading a particularly miserable life, that a person isn't
satisfied with him or herself. We can't change their lives for
them, and we can't condone the cruelty or let it go unnoticed or
unpunished, but let's try to be like the doctor who works to discover
the cause of the symptoms. Let's recognize that even cruel
people are human beings who are possibly going through more difficult
trials than we are, or who have never been taught how to deal with
trials. Let's recognize that even the cruel people are children
of God and deserve our love and compassion. Let's never repay
cruelty with cruelty, for then we're adding to the lack of unity and
harmony in the world, and we're doing just what the cruel person has
done, except we can rationalize it as justified because we're doing it
in retribution.
Cruelty is hurtful and
very difficult to understand, much less forgive. But people are
people, and the same God made us all, so let's try to recognize that
cruel people are hurting people, and we'll never rid the world of
cruel people until we rid the world of people who are hurting. |
