There are certain secrets that were once quite pointedly locked away in my subconscious, formative events that wrote large in my development but were for numerous seeming sensible reasons were better kept safe away from the comprehension of others, particularly family and judgmental peers.
I came to terms with the events slowly and painfully over several decades before I felt confident enough to open that very private space for others scrutiny. That first exposition was cathartic, allowing for the first time in many years my mind to wander openly about my memories, without the previously necessary safeguards of heavy drapes to disguise unpalatable segments. I still feel obliged to keep specifics, the more intimate details vague, generalized. For detail, explicitness, is the enemy of outrage, sometimes making the most horrendous activities less disturbing by clinical analysis and dissection.
On occasion a current event will find and worry the still palpable scars, causing involuntary shudders to descend my spine, and grimaces to momentarily invest my features. Such discomfort keeps me emotionally real, constant, undaunted in my everyday attention, alert to those unrepentant evils that eternally ferment beneath some individuals seemingly harmless exteriors. Also I am reminded that trust once dissipated is unrenewable, some misdeeds cannot be forgiven no matter any changes in circumstances or shows of contrition.
Evil has many faces, but all the visages have one commonality, a lack of self-control, no ability to diagnose situations ethically and act accordingly, not understanding the differences betwixt right and wrong, what scientists are inclined to now call sociopathy, as if making wickedness a disease changes it from a chosen act to some excusable repercussion of self-engrossed behavior.
My initial answer to the evil doer is to get medieval, but of course such barbarity offends my liberal inclinations, yet somehow seems wholly more appropriate than sharp words and confinement. There is no effective cure for wickedness that I am aware of, please do advise me if you know better.
Daily Abstract Thoughts 