Sympathy for the Devil

hasan, evil, mental illness

Sympathy:

the fact or power of sharing the feelings of another, esp. in sorrow or trouble; fellow feeling, compassion, or commiseration. It's hard for most to feel sympathy for a person who has done a terrible thing, for someone like Major Hasan. I understand why. He ended and ruined so many lives, and were he alive there is no explanation, no apology he could give, no action he could take to undo or make up for what he did. No matter what or who he was before he started shooting up Fort Hood, the Fort Hood killer is what he'll always be from now on. And yet, I sympathize. I wonder what drives people past the brink. What is it that motivates a man who lived peacefully for over 40 years to commit such terrible mayhem? Was it madness? I understand that. Psychosis is not an uncommon side effect of porphyria. I don't like to talk about it, but I had a psychotic break shortly before being diagnosed. I remember those 3 days as fear, wave after wave of raw terror with never a moment of relief. Had someone put a loaded weapon in my hands, I probably would have blown my own head off to end the fear, but maybe not. Maybe I would have tried to kill everyone who was scaring me, which was everyone at that point. The dirty little secret of psychiatry is that it is a profession with a very high suicide rate. It's hardly surprising. Psychiatrists act as psychic garbage disposals, constantly absorbing the misery and pain of others. It's hardly surprising when the line gets clogged. Then there is the concept of the "trigger", wherein a sane person simply experiences more than they can bear and snaps. Some will argue that this is nonsense, that they will never snap, and they point to all the people who never do as proof. I think this is perhaps an unwillingness on their part to confront the evil within, the evil in all of us. I am a gentle person. I am loathe to hurt another person in any way, physically or emotionally. I feel tremendous guilt when I accidentally hurt another person's feelings, so the concept of me, in my right mind, killing other people is ridiculous. Except it's not. Push me the wrong way, hit enough of the right triggers, and I know, though I don't want to think it, that I could do something terrible. We all would. The difference, the only difference, between any of us, so safe in our peaceful sanity, and Major Hasan, is that his triggers were pushed, hard enough and often enough. Perhaps his triggers were easier to push, but we all have them. So sympathize with the devil, because only then can we hope to prevent such tragedies in the future. We need to learn from these events, and we can't unless we sympathize. Our servicemen and women are hurting. They come back from war quite predictably changed, and what do we offer them? Very little. "Go home, get a job, thanks for all the kills" and then they go back home, often unrecognizable to their loved ones, and can't get bombs and blood and horror out of their minds. We spend tens of thousands of dollars training them to kill, and very little training them to live again. Major Hasan was trying, and well, we know what happened there. Sympathy is the only hope we have. Unfortunately, it seems to be in quite short supply.