The darkness within

Contemplating the premise that the darkness alleged to be in Dennis Rader is potentially in everyone is a disturbing thing to do.

Sometime in the early 1980s, I went out on the balcony of my parents' townhouse with a watering can to water the hanging baskets of flowers. As I looked off the balcony, I saw my cat laying on the woodchips in the garden below. A cruel thought struck me, and I tipped the watering can, bombing the cat with a half litre of water. Startled awake, he tore off.

I remember this incident, because I vividly remember delighting in an essentially vicious act. The poor cat was fourteen years old, the feline equivalent of a 70 year old. I know there is a certain darkness in me. There is in a lot of people, I see it all the time - the way people gawk at accidents, which incidentally is something I don't do. But at the same time, it is not something I'm keeping at bay, struggling to hold in check. Selfishness, schadenfreude, my years as the older brother bully - rather these things surface from time to time in new ways, and I try to learn from my self-examinations how these cynical and self-oriented feelings show themselves in me. And then I seek out yet new ways of improving and changing these characteristics.

In the Swami Uptown blog at Beliefnet, Jesse Kornbluth posits that perhaps Rader was harbouring some sort of kink. He seems to suggest that if Rader had been free to indulge this kink, and not constrained by the religion he had, well... "Fewer murders?" is an outcome Kornbluth speculates as being possible.

I can't say I accept this premise. For starters, Rader's kick, if he did this, seems to be power. With reports that his exploits in his professional life include measuring grass with a ruler and videotaping backyards in order to find petty bylaw violations, it is hard to imagine anything could have substituted for his thrill - if he had it in him to kill other people without remorse, playing leather dress-up with his wife probably was never going to do it for him.

We may all have a certain darkness. But some people have a lot more of it than most, and perhaps it is a pathology. Most of us can overcome the dark parts of our beings, even triumph over it, by integrating it into our understanding of the world around us, making us wiser, stronger, and better as we improve ourselves.

But then there are some who don't even want to overcome the darkness - they just fake it well enough to hide in our midst. It is frightening to contemplate, and a darkness of its own to do so, just like watching car wrecks. I certainly now wish I'd decided to linger on more pleasant things...