Is there a situation where it's appropriate to be unkind?
Who is the one to decide what is or isn't unkind? What gives anyone the right to make that judgment call just by looking at another person's actions? How can you know what took place in the moments, days, weeks, months, or even years before the point that you are witnessing and deeming that individual "unkind?"
There have been many times in my life that someone likely saw me as such, times when I most probably would have strongly disagree and others when I would have used words far harsher to describe the place I had reached in my head.
I think of those days after my family died in Vukovar, the way people wanted to offer comfort, and how I shoved them away. I didn't want their sympathy, I didn't need their pity, neither of those things were going to bring Danijela or our babies back to me. I wanted the hatred that was welling in me, I needed to feel that anger because with my mind on that, I could forget how much pain I was in. Did that mean that the words I hurled at those who only thought to help me through those days was justified, to me it did, to them, likely not.
What of the violence I have been capable of in my life? I think of the death of the mugger, the threats I have made to those who have harmed those close to me, were any of those incidents justified, were my actions appropriate? The mugger, the wife beaters, the man who held a gun on my wife and child, who threatened me with death, yes, I was unkind, and if I had to live through those days again I am not sure that my actions would be any different.
I don't know that we can ever second guess ourselves, we do what we have to do because we have no choice. Life isn't always roses and sugar, life is blood, and violence, and sometimes it steals lives from those that have barely had a chance to taste it, and that isn't appropriate either.
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