Banality of Evil

Banality means it’s boring, trite, everyday, commonplace, unremarkable… How sad.

The Horrible Things We Fantasize About….   There are movies like Kill Bill, etc.   We like our superheroes to beat up on the bad guys.   We are all positively insane about vengeance.   Loopy Lou and Mad Madden and Insane Zane, ate Crazy Crayfish (and nuts).   Darth Vader and The Emperor say to Let the Hate flow through you.  Our minds are private, and we imagine all kinds of private things to help us cope.   Like using the force to make things fly through the air or whatever.   Life is full of indignities, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, things that make you go gr.   If you hurt painfully enough, or for long enough, you want justice, revenge, payback, karma, even pain, on the perceived perpetrator(s).   It’s enough to impart compassion for the most heinous criminals, actually.  I mean, I understand, at least.   Every single one of us, the devil inside, sang INXS.    Personally, I am completely, utterly, totally fed up with head shocks.   Enough.  I feel judged, tormented, and aggravated, unjustly.   It’s kind of a nightmare.  But if my tormentor were to be karmically afflicted with a right and just (proportional) retribution, I would have to admit maybe anticipating some pleasure from that idea.   I would have my satisfaction.   Life should not be, as Buffy said in BTVS, a “big sucking thing,”   full of malice and resentment and misery and depression and thirst for blood / vengeance.    It should be happy, fun, entertaining, sexy, and alive.   No wonder people get twisted.   Victims should not be savage and terrifying.   There shouldn’t be severe childhood abuse, and deep-seated hate for one’s own identity.  Matt Groening titled his comic, Life is Hell.   Ha, funny.   Militaries should not exist.  Nuclear weapons and flamethrowers should not exist.   A God who is the Source of All Goodness should not be a hypocrite who says Thou Shalt Not Kill, but is documented in the biblical murders of 2,821,364 people (sinners, presumeably).  We should not all be conditioned to Learned Helplessness.   Crime should not exist.  Meditation hardly seems like the solution.   I think it can be, though.  (“Meditation is the process whereby we gain control over the mind and guide it in a more virtuous direction.   Meditation may be thought of as a technique by which we diminish the force of old thought habits and develop new ones.” -Dalai Lama).  So, first mind, then character, then behavior.   Everything helps.   The bible says everything is frustration, futility, absurdity, nonsense.   You can be a vicious and violent virtuous victim.  You can be a kind psychopath.   Making a difference can be making a difference.  Myself, I squish bugs and eat meat and write.  If Only God is good, and God killed “only” 2.8M+ enemies, well….   what are we teaching our children?  The bible also says not to repay evil with evil, but if vengeance is considered virtue, probity, and righteousness, then it’s all basically Whatever, I guess.   I still have MY values, (Bible) God be damned, alright?  We are all dark, the most virtuous among us, especially.  That’s what it is to be human.  We must cultivate peace and equanimity.   Fairness and justice get perverted into some big malicious act of vengeance that makes nothing better besides satisfying a hunger for karmic payback and punishment (sometimes, “seven-fold”).   I don’t like it.  Not at all.   I’m happy in my cocoon, fulminating against evil and hypocrisy, and staying out of the fray.   If there’s a perfectly virtuous psychopathic God who is the Source of all goodness killing the wicked willy-nilly, well maybe more power to him.   But that God is not me.  

Nobody is pure evil, and anyone who is pure good would let these supposedly depraved demons live, as I see it.  It's all good.   I mean, life is good.   For me, now, at least.   I know it gets twisted.