Creative Content

When I was in college, I went to a house party once.  There were a lot of people there and everyone was smoking and drinking and gathered in groups.  I went to school with a lot of international students in my hall. 

I remember being there drinking alot.  We were sitting around on couches just laughing and talking about everything under the sun.  People were getting high.  The smell of pot was strong in the air. We were downing beer from red solo cups that we got near the keg out back. 

There was this Columbian guy a little older than me.  He told a story.  I don’t know what brought it up. It seemed odd though looking back on it. 

He said one night in Columbia, he and his friends were drunk driving on the back roads coming from a party late at night when out of nowhere a mestizo came up on the road and they side swiped the man hard. 

“Was he dead?”  Asked one of the others. 

“Yeah, probably,” he shrugged kinda indifferently and took another swig.

“You didn’t check?”

“No,” he said.  “He was a mestizo.”  He said it like it explained everything.

I knew no Spanish.

“What is a mestizo?”  I asked.

“An Indian,” he said.  “We don’t give a shit about them.”

And he looked around to his friends for agreement and nods and then the conversation went on.

He told me he murdered someone but it was okay cause that person wasn’t valuable. 

Sometimes, folks do really really bad stuff and justify it by saying someone didn’t matter.  They can pretty much rationalize anything in their head if they try.  Sometimes they say someone was bad so it is ok.  Sometimes they say this person is homeless so who cares?  Sometimes they say well she’s just a girl so who gives a crap?  They say he’s just a kid no one cared about. Sometimes they say this or that.   They make all sorts of excuses.

But when you strip away the details and get down to the nitty gritty, people did what they did and do what they do because….well, they didn’t see any value in the person in front of them and that is why it was ok.  That person had no worth, was insignificant, and not important.

You can do whatever you want to someone when you think they are trivial and there will be no repercussions.  And you can rationalize it till the cows come home if that’s what you need to do to sleep at night and not go insane. 

It’s hard for folks to admit they got the monster inside them and that they enjoyed or were indifferent to doing what they did or doing what they do. 

Food for thought.