I haven’t yet said anything of substance about two of the major news stories of the day because I’m too busy pondering how fucked up people can be and how it feels like trying to climb out of quicksand when you start to suss out the reasons why humans can be so utterly fucked up that they feel entitled to fuck up other people’s lives in the most unforgivable ways.
You’ve got this sick fuck barging in on a one-room schoolhouse in pacifist Amish territory — a school without a phone, for God’s sake — armed with “an arsenal of chains, wire, handcuffs, clamps, toilet paper, bolts, bullets, a 9-millimetre semiautomatic pistol, two shotguns, a stun gun, two knives, two cans of gunpowder and 600 rounds of ammunition” — Oh, and “KY Jelly and a long board with 10 large eyehooks attached” — dismissing all the boys and the adult women, and setting about his plan to sexually abuse several girls ages six to 13 or so, and then kill them.
He shot them in the back of the head, one by one, before turning the gun on himself.
Roberts’ motive in the killings appeared to be a mixture of sadness and anger over the death of his own premature baby nine years ago and a desire to continue molesting young children, as he indicated he had done when he was younger, Miller said.
And it’s impossible to make sense of something so completely depraved. I want to call it evil. But I don’t even know what that means. Where does this awfulness come from? How does a person get so rotten on the inside that he can do something like this? Something plotted, meticulously, to be brutal and hateful? And what can you do to stop this rot taking hold inside others when it seems to happen sporadically all the time, all over the world?
Then over in another corner, you’ve got a different kind of depravity in Mark Foley — a depravity that smacks of opportunism and abuse of power, and the sickening perversion of trust we place in those people we choose to lead us. Now it has come out that Foley was allegedly molested by a priest when he was younger, which introduces yet another variable into the sordid tale of a middle-aged lawmaker with a penchant for having cybersex with teenagers during taxpayer-funded work hours.
And surrounding Foley are his partisan cronies who are doing their best to spin this as a gay thing, as an alcoholism thing, as analogous to Monicagate — as anything that would take the weight off of a Republican party that has rested for several years now atop a soft, rancid foundation of hubris and hypocrisy that should enrage even the most hardcore Republican. Again, I don’t understand what’s wrong with a person’s core to make him think doing something like this would be OK, or what would make other people feel okay with being complicit in the inaction it took to keep this mess quiet for long enough to retain power.
Sick. The lot of them.
And I’m simply unequipped to make sense of any of it.