It’s interesting the way people can’t imagine people. My mom watches and talks to me about killers she watches in documentary television shows. Much of the killing and their details just blend together in my head. Some are memorable, all are murders. My mom can’t imagine what brings people to do these things. To kill. I imagine to say that most of it just comes from being able to do it, I imagine. You can be motivated but enabling yourself the power to kill someone is simple as saying you’re going to do it and doing it. People try to break down people like they’re complex when I think most of us are simple creatures, it can be emotional, or detached. Either way its simple as a decision made in blood or mind.
I just finished watching No Country for Old Men and I couldn’t help but think of this fact. The face of evil is not compelling, its the people, its the stories told that are compelling. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell reminds me of my mother. He’s a simple man and he retires out of fear of what the country is turning into after the events of the movie. A decent man crosses a line he shouldn’t for money. Though there’s a story that’s told. About Ed Tom Bell’s uncle, his uncle was a lawman like him. He is gunned down over a dispute between him and some men. They watched him die as he struggled to use his shotgun to shoot them back. 1909 was the year this happened. The story is of a time that Ed thinks of as sacred. The same things happen through out time. People kill people. Men kill men. Men kill women. Women kill men. Women kill women. People kill people. What he sees as an aberration of the coming times is nothing but the same thing that’s always been happening. Just there’s more of it. People struggle between themselves over money or over the fact of a killing. The man telling the story of his uncle was shot and lost the use of his legs. Ed Tom Bell asks if he would do anything to the man that took his legs if he was released from prison. He says no. That the bleeding wouldn’t stop if he had did that. But the man died in prison and that’s that. Ed Tom Bell is scared of a world where goodness does not exist and where people don’t desire it. Every thing that visits a person must be earned in some way. He says that he had wished God would have come into his life but He didn’t.
My mom watches shows where the state becomes divine justice. People are locked up and the key is thrown away and that to her is justice. I believe a person can cross that line and retreat back to the other side after. People can change. They can feel the worth of human lives. This country is as broken as it is fixable. Not everyone who sins will do the thing they should do but neither does a decent man. I can imagine people, but I can’t know. Maybe that unease with the subject is too hard to broach.
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