This begins with innocence.
I was throwing rocks in a stream for the pleasure of the splash, for the pleasure of throwing rocks into a stream or to see how far I could make them go. I was 12 or 13, old enough to know.
There were ducks fifty feet or so upstream. I aimed for the pleasure of aiming so wrapped up in the mere physics of moving. No one told me to do it. No one said, “Get them.”
The rock caught a duck at the base of its left wing, and the crack of its bones reached me in that crisp air.
I had not imagined the sound, the impact, the possibility, the staggering desperate wounded flailing. I had not imagined the sickness I felt or the paralysis or the shame.
This time I had not been sudden witness to something living slaughtered by another so it could be left in a tree, a badge of glory. I did this myself, alone, thoughtlessly, without intent, just a boy aiming and throwing, believing nothing would happen.
I could not have said it then, but after I did this, I do not think I ever believed in my intrinsic goodness again, that cheap kind of sloppy conviction that says, “I am one of the good, a member of that club.” Later on I saw more clearly how much harm such hollow innocence can do, how much damage it does. I understood that a belief in our own implicit righteousness is obscene. The more diligently we recite our profession of faith that we are among the upright, the more dangerous we become. Look out at the world and witness all the horror people who believe in their special innocence bring to bear.
No, I discovered that cruelty slips easily into a life. We have hands. We think, “Sure.” We pick up something heavy or sharp, anything we can make lethal. We obey orders or we do what we want, or we wander around, thoughtless and inattentive, banging into other creatures, saying, “Whoops” or “You shouldn’t have been there,” and we go on brutishly believing in our own rectitude. As individuals, most of us begin to slide into hideous ideas and hideous conduct not through genuine evil but because not thinking is so effortless.
I am not good because so and so gave me birth and raised me or because I have this skin color or because I am tall. No, I learned that goodness is hard won, won daily, and only, only ever earned action by action.
