A woman was kidnapped in one city. Her head was found in another and her body was found in the next town over. I was 10 years old when I heard this report on the news. My dad promptly turned off the TV and said that we would stick to fictional horror movies rather than the violent reality of our country.
To this day, I remember the shock I felt after hearing that haunting report.
But not a lot shocks me anymore.
The boogeyman’s not under our beds anymore. He’s in our schools, in our neighborhoods and in the house next door.
This month marks the first anniversary of the vicious attack on Florida teen Michael Brewer. Last year, three of the 15-year-old’s classmates ganged him, poured alcohol on his clothes and set him on fire. He suffered burns on more than 65 percent of his body and endured months of agony.
Why did a trio of misfit teenagers almost kill their peer? For $40, a DVD and a bicycle. That’s how much a human being’s life is worth to them.
There’s also the case of another Florida teen, 15-year-old Wayne Treacy, who repeatedly kicked a young girl in the head with steel-toed boots. This bout of violence was brought about by a different type of cruelty. The girl, another 15-year-old, made cruel comments about Treacy’s brother, who’d committed suicide. To this day, the girl still suffers from the injuries she received.
On Sept. 28, two teenagers ganged a 16-year-old boy in Seattle, Wash. They beat him for more than four hours, burned him with cigarettes and urinated on him. The boy is in the hospital in critical condition. When questioned by police, the two bullies, one African-American, the other Filipino, said that they’d committed this brutal crime in revenge of slavery.
Coming from a pair of 16-year-olds, who’ve been born into the most liberal and accepting time in our nation’s history, this excuse confounds me. I’m Jewish and lost relatives during the Holocaust, but I wouldn’t attack a German today in revenge. Ultimately, people will do something hateful and then use any excuse to justify it, whether it makes sense or not.
It takes this level of depravity, committed by people so young, to horrify me. Not that long ago, when I was 16, I was putting on zit cream and studying for my SATs.
Don’t get me wrong. Growing up in such a diverse and unpredictable city such as New York, I saw a bunch of crazy things. But a knife-fight between two drunks outside of a bodega is miles away from two teens putting cigarettes out on a peer or setting him on fire.
What happened to us? Why are we so full of hatred? Where is this lack of empathy coming from?
I’m a scientist. The philosophy of metaphysics, the existence of evil is beyond my capacity. Children beating children, scorching their fleshes and humiliating them does not make logical sense. This is a cold violation of innocence. If evil does exist, this is the start of it.
