A couple of media analysts kind of cheesed me off when they talked about it. What they said boiled down to "This woman must have been a psychopath," or some such.
I'm unconvinced. I judge everybody by myself, and I carry grudges against certain childhood tormentors to this day, and that's going on forty years past now. I don't know whether I'd act out on them---but it might be for the best if they didn't cross my path. Ever.
To forgive and forget might be an ideal, but is it something that we should expect to happen, and without resort to psychological doubletalk about motivations?
That a woman might by chance encounter someone who once did harm to her, and then take advantage of the situation to extract revenge, doesn't seem indicitive of a psychopathic personality to me. And in an era where, say, blood feuds persist between families beyond anyone affected by the incident, or where countries plot to recover lands taken by enemies centuries before, is a revenge murder of this sort understandable?
I bear long grudges too. Would I kill over them? Hopefully not. But everyone has their 'price'. Everyone can be pushed too far, under the right circumstances. For some people, it takes a LOT of pushing and very extreme circumstances. For others, they cave more easily.
While a grudge over losing a boyfriend seems a bit hard to sell in fiction (the whole life is stranger than . . . concept) there are certain unforgivable crimes that the grudge could play out over years.
Lisa Scottoline used the general idea as the basis of her book Vendetta Defense . She started with the idea of when, or if, is homicide justified. The offense/ "grudge" started decades earlier in pre-WWII Italy and carried over to America. The result was an 80 year old Italian man being tried for the murder of another 80 year old Italian. Lisa did a really great job with the idea. I highly recommend the book.
There have been a number of movies where the plot was that the mother, generally, of rape/murder victim tracks down daughter's killer after he is aquitted and murders him. The one whose name escapes me was a Sally Feild/Keifer Sutherland film - An Eye for an Eye .
But fortunately for writers, revenge is grist for the mill. It's hard for us to be imaginative enough to out-do the horrific things that people do to each other. Anyone who follows the news reports has no shortage of ideas for grizzly stories of revenge.
There are, of course, degrees, all the way from "perfectly normal" to "Ted Bundy." At some point along the spectrum, we label them clinical.
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Anyone who follows the news reports has no shortage of ideas for grizzly stories of revenge.
Only if you were mad at a bear, or the bear was mad at you. (I couldn't help myself.)
Anyway...yeah, I've taken revenge on the above-mentioned grudge targets in my writings, too...usually reserving a first or last name for somebody either (a) a villain, or (b) scum-of-the-earth, or (c) non-pitying pathetic. (Maybe it's best these are all unpublished.)
Look at a couple of facts implicit in the story. First, this nurse has had a life in the past thirty years that included a sucessful career as a medical professional, or she wouldn't be in a position to kill this other woman, right? Second, the past offense, in and of itself, isn't on the same level as deliberately killing a helpless patient on the table.
That means that, objectively speaking, the woman did not have a sufficient motive for non-psychopathic murder. This other woman didn't "ruin her life" and there is nothing comparable about the "crime" being "punished" with death.
The thing to remember about psychopaths is that they do have motives for the crimes they commit, it's just that the motives are so solipsistic and disproportional to any normal sense of interpersonal empathy that we are forced to conclude that the psychopath doesn't have a normal sense of interpersonal empathy. Not that the lack of such a sense, in and of itself, is a problem. Vanilla-san lacks any such sense of empathy, and yet Normad finds her the most lovable of the Galaxy Angels. Of course, Normad is a defective AI looted from an obsolete missile...but I agree with him
It's also important to note that often a person will have normal empathy with one group of fellow-humans but exclude most other humans from empathic consideration. This is not psychopathic behavior, though it is often mistaken as such by people who are unaware of the irony of this mistake. The irony of labeling a person psychopathic is that, by doing so, the labeler usually is removing that person from "empathic consideration" in their own mind. Clinical psychopaths don't relate to any other humans with normal empathy, and fail to be aware of this.
In other words, if we change the story so that this woman belonged to a network of friends, all of whom had been betrayed by this one woman, then we could see this murder as expressing a sense of normal empathy for the members of her social circle. But without such a change, such that this past crime is recognized by "everyone" in the nurse's immediate society, the nurse is simply acting as a psychopath. She's doing this based on a world-view in which she is the only person in the universe who has "real" feelings.
Of course, as I've said, that doesn't make her unlovable, though it might lead her to do bad things. Many of the most memorable characters in literature (and not a few of those from life and history) are psychopaths, after all.
Do people really poison their minds, hearts, and souls by holding grudges for this long?
Really?
I was as tormented as anyone else at school. Guess what! Pretty much everyone was! Pretty much everyone hated high school and junior high because of bullies or people who said or did mean and thoughtless things.
The bully grudge is the new psychology term that everyone's been casting around since high school shootings have become all the rage.
Ten years ago it was the 'disfunctional family' so everyone was convinced they came from a disfunctional family (including my frenzied sister) when the vast majority of families were pretty much normal--imperfect but normal. Did you ever think that maybe such ideas breed the beast? Maybe we're all oversensitive to those past harms because so much attention has been given them in certain high profile incidents? The latest media squeak gets the grease until we start thinking the squeak is commonplace and applies to us, when in actuality it's very rare.
Well, let me let you in on a little secret. To be bullied in school is the norm, not the exception. It's just part of going through the process. It's all a big fishpond. Even the biggest bullies were bullied or teased at some point in their development. I guarantee. It's a sad, stupid part of growing up human.
Even more sad and stupid when we can't grow up and get over it, thereby perpetuating it well into adulthood.
Why don't we buck the media trend and write awesome stories about people who triumph over the setbacks in their lives, instead of people who let their setbacks rule and define them?
Now THAT would be something!
By the way, Eric Harris has been diagnosed as a psychopath. It had nothing to do with bullying - he simply could not empathize, and he despised everyone but himself. The reason we invent all these spurious explanations is that we're unwilling to accept the idea that some people may be born without a conscience.
[This message has been edited by trousercuit (edited October 02, 2006).]
The problem with the whole nurse scenario is that her actions are disproportionate to the event thirty years ago. First off, you can't steal a boyfriend, unless he's in a coma and you're harvesting organs. Second, it was 30 years ago. Third, the nurse created this murder over the thirty years. She nurtured it, fed it, and unleashed it. The boyfriend theft became her life's defining moment. I wonder now that her life is ruined, will she blame her victim for that as well?
A healthier way to handle it might have been to slap the boyfriend and flip off the woman thirty years ago, then move on with her life counting herself lucky to be rid of that horse's ass. Not kill the woman while she is helpless and unaware, violating every oath and training a nurse receives. It's crazy.
I love The Count of Monte Cristo. I even liked movies like Kill Bill! and Payback. A good revenge tale can be very cathartic. The revenge has to be proportionate to the injustice for it to work. Otherwise it's psychopathic and pathetic.
We're quickly getting to the point that we won't be able to look evil in the face and call it by name. We have such faith in physical determinism -- in the absolute control of atoms over actions (e.g., neurology, endocrinology) -- that we start to cede what control we have to these apparently indomitable forces. We feel powerless because everything can be explained away, so we become powerless by neglecting the requirement to exercise our wills to overcome our evil impulses.
I won't say that all bad actions are worthy of the name "evil", nor that matter doesn't matter; but do we really have to assume that someone must be sick to do something sickening?
Edited for clarity
[This message has been edited by oliverhouse (edited October 02, 2006).]
Tormenting goes on past school into adulthood---only adults are better equipped to deal with it. This last week, at work, I was threatened with dismissal for doing something exactly how I was told to do it. (By a guy who...but that's libelous, so I won't repeat it here. And it's beside the point.)
As a kid I might have tried to lash out with my fists (and fail at it). As an adult, I have some confidence in my ability to strike out, and with that confidence I can calmly and rationally stand my ground. Today I was not bothered---the guy bothered others over the same issue, but he didn't bother me.
(But if I'm not working there sometime in the near future, I'll still stand my ground---with a lawyer by my side.)
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There's a media report today, of a guy going into a one-room Amish school in Pennsylvania and killing several, supposedly over "something that happened twenty years ago."
Timely, if awful, report, and it makes me revise my statements: it doesn't take an evil genius, just evil. That's unfortunately unlikely to go away.