In older, wiser times people understood what emotions are stirred when passions are played without thought. They gave room and developed highly refined rituals of courtship and marriage to contain and channel these passions. Now that these containers have been discarded for “freedom” we begin to discover what dams these rituals and customs were to the human psyche, holding back the destructive forces as they focused the powers into dynamos of creativity, and construction.
What happened was not “right.” But it is not unexpected. Our prissy shock denies what is truly human.
Maybe it was his fault. Maybe he had a short fuse that scared her.
Don’t blame the victim when you have no idea about the situation. This isn’t the first or last passion killing. They have occurred since the beginning of time
Indeed. This sort of idea struck me during the Mel Gibson contretemps. It stuck me as bizarre that people would think it necessarily racist or evil that a man, angry, drunk would lash out and say the most hurtful thing that he could think of (consider what siblings and spouses say to one another because they KNOW it will wound terribly). Most people believed that “if he said it it MUST be the way he really feels.” That most saw no other possibility for Gibsons rant suggested to me that our culture is losing touch with the reality of Human Nature.