We Are Under Attack

I recently read a fascinating book called Empire of the Summer Moon, written by S.C. Gwynne.  It's several stories in one book about the American West in the nineteenth century.  The book begins with a pretty nine-year-old girl,  Cynthia Ann Parker, being kidnapped by Comanche Indians from her family's home in Texas.  She disappears deep inside a mystery that would take decades to solve.  Was she brutally raped and beaten like her cousin, Rachel, who was kidnapped with her?  Had she been killed?  Was she sold into slavery?  Or did she embrace the Indians who had killed and scalped her father, grandfather, and left her grandmother beaten, raped, and close to death after their killing rampage through the Parker family compound on the spring morning of May 19, 1836?

While reading this book and for some time after, I struggled (I'm still struggling) with what appears to me to be a human condition, an innate human behavior that has been present from the beginning of man.  Throughout history, we hear over and over and over again stories of humans hurting humans.  I don't understand this.  As long as I live I will never understand why a human being would want to harm another human being.  Can they not imagine what that pain and suffering would feel like if it were them or their loved ones who had been hurt?  Are they not capable of empathy? The Comanches took pleasure in taking Rachel's newborn baby boy away from her, and while she watched, they held his feet and slammed his head against a tree.  But, before we think it was just the Indians who were savages, the American soldiers rode through villages with revenge on their minds and killed every living thing: men, women, children, old people, and dogs.  So, who were the savages?

We are under attack.  It's not Mother Nature with her extreme weather we should fear (although she isn't happy with us...for good reason), or Asteroids from outer space with annihilation on their minds, or Super Bugs from Chinese birds determined to make us sick and then die, or Big Foot hiding behind a tree waiting for us to walk by so he can jump out and go, "BOO!"

The enemy is within.  It is ourselves we need to fear.  I don't understand.  I never will.  I cry for Boston.  I cry for you.  I cry for me.  I cry for the children who will inherit this human condition and for the innocents who will suffer because of it.