by Mel Lawrenz
[Op-Ed in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Sunday, June 8, 2014]
Of all the shocking details about the two 12-year-old girls who allegedly stabbed a friend 19 times — the calculation, the savagery, the lunacy — the one part of the account that struck me the most is when the girls reportedly dragged their bleeding friend into the bushes and left her to die there.
No realization that they had made a terrible mistake. No change of heart. No remorse. Police said one of the girls said of the choice to abandon their friend: “The bad part of me wanted her to die; the good part of me wanted her to live.”
We will be trying to figure out for a very long time what went wrong such that a birthday party allegedly became a setup for an attempted murder among pre-teen girls. In our reflection, we have to pause to think about “the bad part of me.”
If we haven’t figured it out already, heinous shootings, bombings and stabbings often erupt from the lives of people who seem pretty normal. Perhaps isolated, often socially awkward, but not monsters. Inside however, there is “the bad part of me.” This should be sobering to us, and it should compel us to understand.
“The bad part of me” for 12-year-old Anissa Weier allegedly erupted in violence and became headlines. Just weeks earlier, her friend, Morgan Geyser, is reported to have drawn a picture of the fictional online character Slender Man on a napkin at a restaurant, and her obsession seemed amusing. Frightening things happen to “the bad part” of us when our psyches confuse fantasy and reality.
In our communities and families, we ought to be asking one very important question: How can we better look out for each other? Yes, there will be renewed calls for parents to be aware of what their young children are doing on the Internet. And we will look again at the problems of social isolation and ostracism in our schools. We will question whether ghoulish forms of entertainment are healthy. But we will not be going deep enough unless we are watching out for each other and discern what is happening in “the bad part of me.”
One day the London Times sent out an inquiry asking the simple question: What’s wrong with the world today? The editor was surprised to get back an even briefer reply from the widely influential Christian author G.K. Chesterton:
Dear sir:
I am.
Yours,
G.K. Chesterton.
There are dark parts of the soul in each and every one of us. This is the longstanding historic Christian view of human nature. Unpleasant but true. The darkness can be simple ignorance, solved by bringing more light into the situation. For some, darkness has become the living space for evil. Another kind of darkness is delusion, unpredictable and dangerous. If the allegations are true, the suspects seem to have been deluded in that they utterly confused reality and fantasy.
We need to look out for each other. We need to take delusion very seriously. Adults need to understand that the developing minds of children have phases when they are not grounded in reality and that is when they need protection.But watching out for the bad is only one side of the issue. “The bad part of me wanted her to die; the good part of me wanted her to live.” What about “the good part”?
Perhaps the most important question is: How can we look out for each other in order to strengthen, develop and deepen “the good part of me”? Will we take our spiritual lives seriously?