11:00 p.m. - 2003-05-11
tablua rasa non grata
"Im just you in different clothes..."
Right, I did say I'de explain that didnt I?
Well, I'de been thinking about my friends. About how how some of them dont understand how I can be friends with other ones. About how they wonder why I keep forgiving some. About all the things they tell me that no one else seems to know. Things I understand about them that makes them easy to forgive.
The phrase and the idea jumped into my head at the same time. It means: If I had born into your same body, into your same life, with your upbringing, your genetic predispositions, and other people's reactions to that same face, same voice, everything, I'de not only react the same way you did, I'de be you. Basically, that we're all the same to start with, and are completely formed and shaped by our lives, by the things that happen to us, and that is what dictates the decisons we make later on. Its hard to judge someone, when you think that in their place, youde probably do the same thing.
(I'de like to give the examples I was thinking of, but that would be spilling other people's secrets, which I dont do.)
Now I dont know if I believe that to be true. Now I'm thinking of that movie "Dark city" when the aliens try to make that guy think he killed all those women but it doesnt work because hes just not a killer? You know what I mean... Anyway, sure there are minor variables, but say, not everyone who is molested as a child goes on to be a child molester. People go through unimaginable horror and DONT shoot up colleges from the top of a bell tower, DONT walk, guns blazing into a McDonalds, DONT kill their wives, or their children, or a string of prostitutes they think no one will miss. But it happens all the time.
Are we all so different, even before we're born/conceived, that we can react so very differently to similar stumuli? Or can life, with its infinately subtle variation, really do all this TO us?
