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Tribal, leftist narratives fail this test
When I was sixteen, I committed an evil deed. The victim was an innocent girl who not only had never harmed me, she had gone out of her way to be nice to me. When my evil deed reached the ears of Mr. H, the vice principal, he was flabbergasted. “Why did you do this?” He didn’t know me, but he had enough intel to know that “You are normally a shy and quiet girl who has never given any of your teachers a moment’s trouble.”
In fact I often was sound asleep in class, something none of my teachers remarked upon. Mr. H was an old man – maybe forty, or even forty-five. He had been doing this work for longer than I had been alive. He made a disparaging comment about my four older brothers, their wild ways, and bad blood. He stared at me as if I were a new breed of sick freak he had not yet encountered. He assigned me to ten weeks detention and we never spoke again. The detention, ten weeks of sitting for an hour in a room after the end of the school day, gave me more opportunities to sleep. I was working full time at a physically taxing job and I was often too afraid to sleep at home.
When I committed the evil deed, I felt no empathy for my victim. I felt no shame at my own debasement. For years afterward, I never thought about it. It’s only recently that I look back and witness what I did, as if watching a movie with a sudden, shocking twist. The worst aspect of this movie is that, for years, I felt nothing. I wish I could say that I felt horribly guilty. I didn’t. I reverted to that ice cold state. In most of my life, including when I was in high school, I have felt and I feel empathy for others. Can you be a psychopath for an eyeblink of your life’s span?
What was my evil deed? I was verbally abusive of a vulnerable classmate. If you think that doesn’t sound like much of an evil deed, you don’t understand the power of words, and you don’t understand teenage girls. My words were so vicious the girl left the school.
