What's Your Limit to Retribution?
I’m consumed with revenge. Really I am. Any slight real or imagined triggers a phalanx photon reaction as my brain scurries to concoct retaliations—and the more diabolical the better. So when despotic rulers on the run are pulled from drainage pipes, beaten by a populace and summarily executed, my mind says “got what you asked for.”
But in reality I’m a pretty meek guy. At the end of all of my seething convulsions, I typically do nothing more than to turn the other cheek. It takes vast reservoirs of rationalizations, seasoned liberally with more seethe, but ultimately there’s an impulsive reaction within me that says: just let be.
Not so with some people in the world, even some people right down the street, which made this week’s riff off of the content at Tonic.com so easy. Tonic takes us to task this week on our clemency, looking at the issue of Moammar Gadhafi and asking whether we prefer our enemies to be executed or merely just incarcerated. It’s a deeper question than that, really, if you allow yourself to engage in the presence of the question, to be near that drainage ditch, to be viscerally in touch with your seethe and froth and foment and hate.
