I used to believe that people were good. They did bad things and thought terrible, misguided things but... I still thought that they were good. I clung to that belief, determined that I would be that better person. Deep down inside at the very marrow of their bones, the goodness was there. As I grow older, I am starting to realize the truth. Some people are just rotten to the core; sometimes, there is nothing redeemable about them.
We have produced so many good people. So many bad ones too. But the fact of the matter is that most people are just... average. The really good and the really bad are anomalies, people that make other people stop and think. Of course they are, considering the definition of the world. Most people are just in-between, nothing special. They are tools for the more powerful minority to use. They do not think; they are just there. They are not evil, but enablers of evil. What does that make them then? I don't know. All that I know is that they are the oxygen that allows even to continue to smolder. In a way, they are evil too.
Recently, I got a virus on my computer. My father told me that there were people everywhere on our computer, people trying to scam us. Someone else used my mother's credit card until the credit card company realized that they were frauds. Recently, I talked about welfare to a bunch of Republicans. They mentioned all of the users of the system that they had seen, people purposefully trying to manipulate and steal. I had to think. I could not live with the ideas that had comforted me for so long but I had to face the truth. It's the little things that add up, that make me wonder how one person could cheat another and never even blink.
The line between good and evil is so blurry, shrouded by clouds of gray. Good people can be corrupted so easy by material things or by people who are not good; evil is as easy to spread as Ebola sometimes. There are so many people that do not technically qualify as sociopaths, but they function as such and sometimes, they are almost there.
So evil exists. It exists inside of the human heart and not inside of the human act. This I must accept; this I must truly know and acknowledge. Yet despite my intelligence speaking, my hope somehow swallows it out. Something in my heart tells me to believe in something more. But I cannot. Anne Frank was wrong- not everyone is good at heart. Sometimes, people do bad things to good people... and they never, ever get punished and never, ever even suffer a guilty conscience while those good people continue to suffer on and on and on.
I always thought that I was a cynic before, but that was before I realized how much that I believed in the human heart. Now I am losing that faith. There are good people in this world and there are people who stand up, but they are not nearly enough. I wonder how we can expect politicians to care about us and our problems this coming election season when we cannot even care about our neighbors.
As I think, I want to cry for a part of me that I know is lost forever. I have accepted that I probably cannot rely on a higher power to protect me and I have accepted that I cannot always rely on my parents to protect me. I am only starting to accept that people out there will not only refuse to protect me, but look to deliberately hurt me and others for no reason at all (and these number of people are more than I have thought). This heavy knowledge weighs on my shoulder like bricks and now I must wait for it to settle on my chest until it becomes a weight that I finally grow used to.
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| by girltripped at Deviantart (girltripped.deviantart.com) |
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