I Don't Want to Kill Anyone

There must be something wrong with me; I’m failing in one of my prime responsibilities as a human being, especially a male one:

I don’t want to kill anyone.

In spite of my various dissatisfactions with and enmity for lots of people, there’s none of them I wish to murder. I have no interest in bombing, shooting, stabbing, poisoning, strangling, or even enlisting someone else to do any of these things to anyone else.

All over the world, people are expending the greater part of their energies trying to wipe each other off the face of the earth. I’m sure they all believe they have good reasons for wanting to do so, and were I in their shoes, I don’t doubt I would feel the same way. But as I stand here in my own Chuck Taylors, I am not moved to homicide. I could imagine putting a pie in somebody’s face, or heaping verbal abuse on a group of people and their families, but when it comes to wanting to kill them, I’m just not there.

Naturally, this makes me a big sissy, some kind of hippy-dippy loser who doesn’t really understand geopolitics and who has never truly suffered in an appropriately significant way. Granted. But what am I to do? I can barely bring myself to swat a fly; how am I going to find it within me to snuff out another human being?

Of course, if someone across the border had killed my parents or my kid or my parents and my kids, I would likely share the murderous wrath that afflicts so many folks. Still, that seems like way too high a price to pay just for feeling this elemental human emotion.

Maybe I could do something really awful to myself—steal my bike, egg my house, vote Republican—and in that way I’d at least way to kill myself. It’s a start, and perhaps one all those other would-be killers could try.