They have no other use. If you're attracted to them, I'm inclined to think it's because you're attracted to the power they confer. Even if you convince yourself you never intend to use that power, 'at some level' you entertain the possibility that circumstances might arise that would allow you to use it 'justifiably'. Hey, I can identify. I don't have a gun, but I'd kind of like one. I'd like to feel a bit more powerful. But I'm not going to buy one today, because I think guns are for killing people and I don't want to give myself that illusion of power. I think it is ultimately an illusion. Also I don't want to buy a gun for the same reason I don't want to buy a Hummer, or the same reason I buy organic produce, because as a consumer my small decisions support bigger things, and I want them to be the right things.

They have no other use. If you're attracted to them, I'm inclined to think it's because you're attracted to the power they confer. Even if you convince yourself you never intend to use that power, 'at some level' you entertain the possibility that circumstances might arise that would allow you to use it 'justifiably'. Hey, I can identify. I don't have a gun, but I'd kind of like one. I'd like to feel a bit more powerful. But I'm not going to buy one today, because I think guns are for killing people and I don't want to give myself that illusion of power. I think it is ultimately an illusion. Also I don't want to buy a gun for the same reason I don't want to buy a Hummer, or the same reason I buy organic produce, because as a consumer my small decisions support bigger things, and I want them to be the right things.

Although I think I understand what Cary is saying about the nihilism of Cho's actions, what they mean to me is that there are some people who are truly malevolent, and what that means is something I think about a lot, because I happen to know one of those people. Whether this malevolence constitutes badness or madness, is something I go back and forth on. It helps me to forgive the person if I think of it as madness, but then I recognize that there's an utterly selfish volition behind their actions that looks at other people and sees them as opportunities for gathering power, and then I have to see it also as badness. I guess real forgiveness involves confronting that aspect as well. In any case, I agree with the previous commenters who point out that you are clearly not in this category. Some people may not be able to suspend their prejudices for long enough to see this, but other people will know it, and so you're not that different from the rest of us, who are all in different ways viewed through the lens of prejudice, and have to live with the fact that some people don't like us. That's only a problem if we agree with their judgement, which, I regret to say, is all too easy for me at least to do.

The other day I heard the end of a radio program about a book called 'My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend: Making and Breaking Sibling Bonds' by Dorothy Rowe, whose book on Depression is terrific. She had a troubled relationship with her sister all her life. They're now in their eighties, and it sounded like she ended up with a grimly realistic set of expectations about such relationships that is nevertheless not entirely gloomy. I plan to buy it myself. I feel at once very close to my siblings by virtue of the fact that we have a common origin, but very far from them because we've gone on divergent paths like branches radiating from a single stem. It makes me sad because nothing can take away the fact that we grew up together, yet time has taken away that period of our lives. Not that it was idyllic. Far from it. It's a very complicated and sometimes dark kind of intimacy that I share with them, and from my perspective some of them appear to be lost. When we get together every year or two, we slip back into the old roles, but we've become different people now, and the old costumes no longer fit, so there's something grotesque about it all, and I find myself wondering which of us will die first, and unable to imagine the universe without the existence of these people whom I hardly ever see, and don't even know that well anymore.

In my mid twenties I started dreaming about death, waking up in the middle of the night *knowing* that I was going to die. It was very dark, and I became a militant atheist for awhile, mostly out of anger at this inescapable knowledge. People told me to go to a doctor but I went to school and read lots of philosophy instead. Eventually I lightened up. It has never come back with the same intensity, but it changed my outlook permanently. I agree with the theory that a lot of human activities are motivated by a desire to avoid thinking about death, including drug and alcohol use and achievement-seeking. Kurt Vonnegut said we're put on earth to fart around, wisdom that came from his experience of the bombing of Dresden. Reading that in Salon recently, it seemed to legitimise my whole life, which has been spent farting around, and it's been interesting, though not especially lucrative. These days I think I'm kind of a happy person, under all the superficial stuff that I occasionally get exercised about, and it's a long term result of those death dreams. You never know, maybe this experience you're having will turn out to be a strange kind of gift.