I looked at the scratches on the car and felt an odd, familiar emotion sweep over me. It was the emotion of wanting to find the perpetrator and give him (or her) retribution. Not justice - which could have been measured in dollars and cents - but cold vengeance. I wanted to see fear, perhaps even terror in his eyes, and if I could not extract that, then I wanted a pound of flesh.
The scratches were not accidental. They clearly spelled the word "ASS". And they were not on my car, but my sister's.
The frigid and intense fury that overwhelmed me was one I had not felt for some time. It was the anger I felt in college when I found my bicycle trashed by drunk students the night before. It was the anger I felt when tormented in middle school by crude children. It was the anger when I saw graffiti on my locker in high school that made unmistakable and perverted references to my sister. It was the anger one feels when violated by those who hide behind a cloak of anonymity, who are cruel and petty, who take pleasure and humor in the needless and helpless pain of others and know full well that no retribution will be made: the school bullies, the sadists, the rapists, the murderers. It was the anger that can only be bred by frustration and the recognition that true justice in this lifetime is a futile and ironic pursuit.
It is so easy to insulate ourselves from the insanity that is humanity. Surrounded by the security of friends, acquaintances, and those who pretend to respect civility, we forget that our baser human instincts lie thinly beneath the facade. Our truest and most visceral understanding of pain knows full well that the ability to instill fear through the threat of suffering is the ultimate expression of self empowerment. Only fools deny it and posture to be morally superior to the competitive destruction. Only fools believe that they are not prone to employing the same manipulations.
Fools simply dress it up as self-righteousness.
I did not want justice; I wanted vengeance. I wanted to assuage my insecurities by asserting my own form of dominance and cruelty and hate under the guise of equal retribution. Such pretense, I believe, is the rationalization that drives much of the "justice" in my own sick mind and our own sick world. The ultimate mockery of such a noble concept!
In my room is a poster with the entire text of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. The only reason I have it is for Shylock's speech:
Hath not a Jew eyes?
Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions;
fed with the same food,
hurt with the same weapons,
subject to the same diseases,
heal'd by the same means,
warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?
If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility?
Revenge.
If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?
Why, revenge.
The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
Perhaps these words surprise you about myself, a person who gives off the appearance of being dedicated to compassion. But who can understand the power of healing that does not also recognize the power of pain? Given the opportunity for vengeance, which of us would not revert to the same form of playground pettiness?
I scare myself. I don't like to think that I would ever be so cruel... but I know I could. I know how tempting it is to enter into the unforgiving cycle of violence because I know what it means to be afraid and what it means to be angry. And this is why I find the person of Jesus to be so incomprehensible, that any being with a shred of humanity within could say, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do," and then willingly die a cruel and stupid death.
I want that kind of liberation.
I want that kind of love.
I know a place,
A wonderful place
Where confused and condemned
Find mercy and grace
Where the wrongs we have done
And the wrongs done to us
Were nailed there with him
There on the cross.
- At the Cross, by Randy & Terry Butler
