The Despicable Ones
Not used to always being on guard, suspicious of ulterior motives, manipulation, trickery, masked intentions, deceit. Every gesture of goodwill is inextricably bound to a will to manipulate, to treat as an object, to shake gain out of. I cannot trust anyone. Words are full of congenial thorns which twist and wrench upon grabbing hold, break the skin internally where you can’t see it, suck your blood through the vine like a lamprey.
Their brain is an ugly creature. If you could see it, you would want to mash it, burn it, stomp it, bury it, the stinking, frothing mass of control and lust, with no positive capacity for understanding.
The kids learn to turn off their consciousness. Or maybe they are taught by a world of zombies with atrophied compassion. They lose their empathy and the entire nervous system becomes rooted in I Want; no other sensation transmits signals that percolate into action. There is no rule defining the limits of behavior. Anything can be denied, then reasserted at the convenient moment. Running around the morbid lab with people’s open hearts on bunsen burners, drained into by vials of caustic chemical, test tubes filled with abuse, they experiment ceaselessly, mercilessly. The aorta palpitates, shudders, screams, contracts, recoils, shrivels, turns into a grey stone. And taking off their sacrosanct lab coats they blink through ogle-eyed glasses and look absurdly surprised at the lifeless result.
Among all the swaggering teenage self-proclaimed “priests” trying to sell me their approval, who viciously denounce me as a “bad man”, “no good”, full of “bad karma” when I refuse to buy, is there no one who will stand up and say, “No no, this is wrong, this is a perversion of human trust, of our pure belief”? Man or woman, young or old, is there no ethical dissenter?