32 Flavors

The Wheelie Bin Killer has been jailed for life.

I first heard this bizarre story on a Media Law class trip to the Old Bailey (London's central criminal court).  A 42-year-old woman is motivate by anger, jealousy, or some undetermined cause to drug and suffocate her lover, stashing his body in a wheelie bin (US translation: garbage can), which she then proceeds to store in her bedroom for 11 days until she is discovered by police.  The convicted murderer was quoted as saying that she'd measured her freezer but found it too small.  She will be serving a minimum of 17 years on a life sentence.

Aside from the macabre details of this case, hearing about it and others like it prompts me to ask the question, "What in God's name is wrong with people??"  What could possibly inspire someone to act in such a way?  And it goes well beyond the extreme example of murder.

Every day I see firsthand or hear about things that make me shudder.  The language we use with one another.  The way we treat those we claim to love.  The things we expect as entitlements while being unwilling to sacrifice ourselves.  The garbage blowing around the streets and the floors of buses and trains.  Random job terminations and the crazy difficulty of securing another position.  Seemingly sound relationships coming to a sudden end.  I could go on.

But if I did, I might go crazy.  Not crazy enough to suffocate someone and stuff them in a wheelie bin, perhaps, but so fixated on negativity that I miss everything going on around me that sings a different tune.

Like the young man who quickly grabbed my arm to prevent my falling down the steps at Aldgate tube station.  Or the former neighbor who kindly retrieves the stray mail I receive at my former address.  Or the hospital patient last night who told me I had a face that "no man could resist." :)

And here as well, I could go on.  It all serves to illustrate that we humans do not come in just one variety.  Within ourselves, even, we are a full spectrum of possibility, inspired action, and mischief.  Ani DiFranco summarizes "I am 32 flavors and then some."  At least 32.

I still don't know what snaps inside a person and makes them carry through on something like murder.  I have theories about nurture, communication, and responsibility, but none of them add up to one human being taking the life of another.  On the other hand, I have no scientific explanation for the impulse to save another from falling, or being hit by a moving vehicle, or from circling the drain amidst their own despair and self-criticism.  This, too, is what being human looks like.

In the end, the gossip in which I indulge, the tiny daggers I fire, or the sum total of every little thing I've helped myself to that wasn't really mine to take may add up to something no more virtuous than the deadly impulse of an evening, resulting in a life sentence.  Fortunately for me (and for you, I assume), we at least have a renewable daily chance to show a different color, and work out our penance on the free side of a barred metal door.

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people are people
the good, bizarre and ugly
which flavor today?