be nice don't kill people

Most of the time I try to "steel myself" against reacting to, or getting grossed out or upset by "news" stories; I honestly ignore most of it -- there's always another horror story.  One of my co-workers  brought up the Casey Anthony story in conversation one day when that incident was prominent in daily headlines:  I heard myself say with resignation & fatigue, "Oh there's always another one." 

I didn't even mean to say that, really; didn't think about it first, just -- automatically put up a "steel wall" between my head and the Latest Horror.  And then thought, later, didn't mean to seem peremptory to the other person when they wanted to maybe discuss a story they had been following....I just -- aaahhhrrrh....When I was a young child, I think I used to hear about some horrible crime and I would think that it was really unusual and weird, and that it could never happen again. (?!)

Don't know how I linked "can never happen again" in there....survival mechanism for being able to -- live.  And concentrate on schoolwork and stuff....
(In fifth grade our teacher assigned us to read the newspaper and bring in "news stories" to "report" -- and then the Charles Manson murders hit the front pages!  Poor Mrs. Otterson!  I wondered sometimes if she wished she had assigned "current events" later in the year when our news stories might have been about more mundane things....)

But now as a grown-up, sometime in time my thought-process arrived at a place where the Realization Dawns on you,when you read a horrible news story:  it's horrible -- AND -- it will happen -- AGAIN.

And most of the time a person just doesn't think about it.  We focus on the things we can accomplish and influence in a positive direction.  Think of what we CAN do, and then work hard, then we're too tired to think of horrors, it's time to sleep.  It's like -- we don't want to "make room" in our thoughts for terrible things we cannot personally impact or redress.

And then today I get "mugged" by this headline about the 18-year-old boy in Dallas, Georgia, who was apparently kept shut in a room, or a two-room section, of his family's house -- and then I get "pulled in" and read several stories about it, which are --
all the (damn) same,
there's nothing new,
and of course no explanation for Why any people would Do such a Thing....

Although some lucid and enlightening insights do reside in some reader-Comments, in the midst of many Commenters screaming for blood and justice.  ("Lock those parents in a room...!")

And I thought of the phrase "the banality of evil."
[from a web site called Radio Open Source, by Christopher Lydon]:
-------------Hannah Arendt coined the term "banality of evil:" while covering the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi official charged with the orderly extermination of Europe's Jews.

...Arendt insisted that only good had any depth.  Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet -- and this is its horror! -- it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world.  Evil comes from a failure to think.  It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there.  That is the banality of evil.
----------------- [end excerpt]

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