Revenge

We recognize the thirst for revenge; that poisonous urge to inflict evil on evil done unto us. It’s a treacherous feeling for it can hardly be quenched. It’s a search for relief by means of a remedy that cannot relieve. Pain can’t be transferred from one person to the next; it can only spread, adding misery to misery.

It’s illogical and unreasonable, but we feel it. Rational man uses his reason to figure out ways to make the world a worse place and his own position in it more intolerable. It is wrong, but it feels right.

Who told you to listen to your feelings and recognize your needs? Someone who wants you to suffer? Someone who knows you are your own worst enemy?

We are wronged all the time. They bump into us because they don’t care or because they care, and we pass it along when we get the chance. They sow anger and we reap it; we sow it and they reap. There is no end to it.

Looking at it from above, it makes no sense. Stories of family feuds are tales of ridicule. The histories of war are chains of senseless action and reaction carried through with vengeful ignorance and otherwise little logic.

We must be in the middle of the fight to understand the feeling, but then there is nothing to understand. An eye for an eye doesn’t give back an eye, but the half blind still craves one.

Reason is not expected from someone who’s blinded by range, but it should be possible from an uninvolved distance. But no, the man of reason is not recognized. The man of emotion is acknowledged by law and his right to revenge is granted.

We punish. The state takes revenge on our behalf. Does it make us feel better?