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What’s It Like To Want To Kill Someone?
Murderous rage destroys lives and it is contagious
I’ve been considering writing about violence and war as an infectious disease.
I decided, “today is the day to start.” One of my friends lost a family member who lived in an Israeli settlement attacked by Hamas terrorists. Their little child was shot but survived. So now there are two orphaned children. She is reluctant to speak out and has already heard awkward and even abusive comments to this deeply tragic news.
Most of our fiction and entertainment is created by people who directly know little of violence. I’m not one of them.
Neither was my lifelong friend and mentor, Algis “AJ” Budrys. He wrote, “Orphans is orphans and we understand each other” in his dedication to me in a paperback copy of his amazing and largely-forgotten novel Hard Landing.
Yes, I am an orphan. Yes, I had to “figure it out for myself” in just about every area of life. Yes, I grew up in a highly mentally, emotionally, and physically abusive home. Nothing like what a child who is raped by a father or grandfather like my friend “Marcy” experienced, but still harmful.
I could have enacted the behaviors that I experienced from my grandmother and carried on the cycle of abuse and devastation of a…
