I have spoken today with someone who still converses every night with the ghosts of the Viet Cong he killed. And every so often I hear a moving speech by an American who has visited Auschwitz and has contemplated the horror. Misanthropic or perhaps envious of such imagined innocence, I think it is very easy and in fact somewhat self-indulgent to contemplate horror when its authorship is assigned to an entity which has been divorced from yourself and safely encoded as evil.
If you visit El Mozote or a Native reservation or many neighborhoods in your own town, or walk by the Estadio Nacional in Santiago de Chile, or visit anyone in jail anywhere; or if you see any such horror without having been convinced, as Americans have been about the Holocaust, that they had nothing to do with its creation and everything to do with its end; then the contemplation of horror does not feel so pure, or so purifying.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 