Whither Cruelty?

Cruelty is the opposite of kindness. To someone with a healthy morality, cruelty is so incorrect, so wrong, so needless, so vile. Yet humans can be so cruel, so unconsciously cruel, so uselessly cruel. To strangers, to family members, to friends, to lovers. Some people even enjoy it.

We are, it seems to me, most cruel to animals. Most of us eat them, which may not seem so cruel until you realize that it's not necessary for us to eat animals to stay alive. & in the United States, the majority of the animals eaten live such constrained & torturous lives that the phrase "free range" is attached to the animals which are not raised & processed in factory farms. We experiment on them, our scientists & researchers for corporations, such horrible tests that a product which is not tested on animals is called "cruelty-free." We pollute their habitats & we've hunted many of them to the brink of extinction, if not extinction outright, often just for sport.

People can justify all of these things as not cruel, & that's also a cruelty, the self-justification that is the process of the human mind, a cruelty to ourselves. Our brains, alas, are wired in such a way as to make it possible for us to explain in glowing terms the miserable things we do, to ourselves, to others, to other creatures. If we don't pay attention to what our mind does, we can find ourselves as cruel as those we loathe & abhor, & we can still vindicate ourselves in the process. Many is a cruel human being who thinks him or herself truly kind.

I myself remember my cruelties as vividly as my kindnesses. I have stepped back & traced the steps which led me to a satisfaction that the cruelty wasn't so cruel, or was even a kindness in disguise. In many cases, the very fact that I was not caught, or was not specifically blamed for a cruel action, was enough to release me from crippling guilt - unless someone else was blamed. My cruelties, fortunately, have never resulted in any real harm (I tell myself at least) because most were petty, mere outbursts of cruelty at perceived wrongs, never anything planned & executed with intent to cause great pain. Maybe most of our cruelties are like that.

Most, but obviously not all.