I look at faraway bands of marauding soldiers wielding machine guns, their faces twisted with hatred, their mouths open in primal screams. I see these images from the Middle East and I think, they are animals. It’s the word we all go to in describing behavior that is not fit to be considered human. I wonder about these men, their childhoods, what happened to them to turn them into such beasts. Were they abused? Were they trained by elders to be violent? Were they brainwashed? Were they proselytized by militant religion? Were they simply told, “Be a man,” and given the duty of slaughtering other humans for this cause or that one? Are they the people who would, in other circumstances, still have become murderers or rapists or animal abusers…their innate violence loosed upon their enemies by the green light of war? If any of them had been adopted as babies and raised by loving parents in peaceful societies, would they have grown up gentle, or would they have become those children who stomp on turtles and put out cigarettes on dogs? Read more…