Killing and Murder

The word alone makes most people flinch. Murder. Killing. This is not a topic for a quiet afternoon — it is the topic from which we collectively turn away, until we see it in the news, until it happens in a war, until in a quiet hour an impulse passes through us and we are startled by what we just felt inside ourselves.

We live in a world where people are killed every day. In wars, in homes, on streets. We see images the body cannot really process. We hear stories that rob us of sleep. And somewhere in us, deep beneath the civilised surface, we know the dark side ourselves — the second in traffic where a thought flashes through us that we immediately push away. The moment of powerlessness in which we wish someone every evil. The fantasy that appears and that we would never tell anyone.