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7. Kill, Killing, Killed
The adults controlling my life had no ability to grasp my perceptions. In some ways I was hyperaware of the world, in other ways, dead to the world. Where I was aware, I was highly intuitive and exquisitely adept at perceiving stimuli with an intensity that could short circuit the nervous system. I was empathetic to the point of it being painful, but I also had the ability to detach emotionally and be purely objective, which quickly became my go-to defense mechanism.
This caused me to respond in ways that confused and even frightened those around me, as I consequently discovered one time when I saw a hurt bird in the street that had been hit by a car. While everyone was saying “Oh, poor bird,” I immediately picked it up and chopped its head off with my pocketknife.
Everyone was horrified at this and became angry with me for this act of mercy. I guess they felt it was more compassionate to watch the bird suffer while saying “poor bird.” I was nine years old at the time. It’s the first memory I have of how some people judge compassion by the amount of sympathy they feel, with little regard whatsoever for the one suffering. It’s a completely selfish act, for they are doing nothing at all for the suffering and only acting to assuage their own discomfort. I was seen as horribly cold and callous, lacking in empathy, when in fact the exact opposite was what motivated me.
This was, and is, the reason I can’t go fishing. I caught a fish once in my life when I forced myself to go fishing because that was what boys were supposed to do. As soon as I pulled my fish out of the river and put it on the ground, I started to cry uncontrollably. I was young and confused and torn between society’s demand that I enjoy fishing and my hypersensitivity to the suffering of the fish. Eventually I threw the fish back in the river, but I think it was dead already. It was this kind of reaction that often caused me to shut down emotionally, and later in life, to become violent and cruel as the shell of protection grew so thick I could no longer feel my own emotions. Perhaps growing up around cruelty and death was a contributing factor. Living between, and later working in, two slaughterhouses, one for cows and one for chickens, where imprisoning and killing animals was not only a way of life, but a profitable one, certainly altered my perspective.
Life, especially the life of animals, was either a profit center or a nuisance. It was common for local farmers to collect newborn kittens from feral cats, throw them in a bag with a rock, and then drop them into the river. My father did the same with our own pet cat when she had kittens, but as we did not live near a river he improvised by flushing them down the toilet. Sometimes they would get caught in the pipes and I could hear their kitten screams as they spent the first, and last, hours of their life in a doomed struggled to survive the blackness of the sewer pipes. A few more flushes and the cries stopped.
In light of the killing and death that saturated my world, decapitating a wounded animal seemed as trivial as blowing my nose. Fifty years later I still can’t understand the reaction of my peers, but I did come to understand one more rule of society: with society’s permission, it’s ok to torture and kill anything that’s edible, inconvenient, or profitable. This observation was soon validated two years later when the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive. This brought the Vietnam War and its 1.5 million deaths into the living rooms of Americans, and Americans into the killing fields of Vietnam. I watched the “Killing Show” on TV news every night and listened to the voices of anger at the injustice, all the while praising the slaughter of the “enemy.” Killing, slaughter, and death permeated every corner of my life now, from the world outside to my living room table. Now the beauty and harmony of my Spectrum Fusion experience seemed more like a cruel joke. How could I be shown how unfathomably blissful life was only to then be delivered into the bowels of hell?
Next -> Part 1: Chaper 8 -- Obituaries for Fun and Profit
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Duncan Stroud can currently be found dancing tango in Argentina. His book, "Legally Blind", is available in eBook and hardcopy