It is easy to point to the evils done in other generations while we sit behind our history books pointing with an accusing finger, shouting "Shame!" It is too easy not to disassociate ourselves from it, not to think that we are better. "Surely I would have stood up for what I know is right," we assure one another. "Surely I would have taken a bullet for my beliefs."

But would you? We can all say "Yes", and we can all believe that we would, but so could the Germans of that age if they had our place. If the generations were switched, and the German youth of 1920's and 30's were my generation and my generation grew up in the 20's and 30's in that defeated country, seething in pain and looking for an outlet, I don't believe anything would be any different. Me and my friends would be the Nazis, and they would be living now, reading about our atrocities in their history classes, shaking their heads in disapproval. My generation is not above being equally as deceived. My generation is not above depravity. Neither am I. I am capable of any evil that any other human is capable of. There is the same bent in all of us.

It's so easy to deny; it's so easy to say, "Evan, you are wrong here. I wouldn't rape somebody. I wouldn't kill an innocent person." If you experienced what the rapist had experienced and had grown up in his place, I daresay you'd do the same thing. If you had grown up in the place of whatever murderer; if you were tormented by the same demons and suffered the same abuses, if you felt the same needs, you would have been the murderer. I am in no way calling for our sympathy towards murderers and rapists. I am in no way saying that these things are permissible or forgivable because it could have been any one of us. No, I'm condemning the whole lot of us. We cannot save us from ourselves.

I am the Nazi holding a machine gun to a mother's head. I am the Roman soldier pounding nails into the Heretic's hands. I am the fanatic who ran a passenger jet into the World Trade Center. I am Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush. I am a human, and if God can forgive these evils of which I am capable and responsible, it's certainly not because I deserve it.



After the Fall, by Arthur Miller
Act One

Quentin: [Considering a concentration camp] This is not some crazy aberration of human nature to me. I can easily see the perfectly normal contractors and their cigars, the carpenters, plumbers, sitting at ease over their lunch pails; I can see them laying the pipes to run the blood out of this mansion; good fathers, devoted sons, grateful that someone else will die, not they, and how can one understand that, if one is innocent? If somewhere in one's soul there is no accomplice-of that joy, that joy, that joy when a burden dies...and leaves you safe?"