Trying to Understand the Incomprehensible

I have been thinking about human beings and how mixed we are. In school I study world history. The subject has become hard to take since we began learning about World War I with the massive battles and senseless military blunders. Now we are studying World War II and the Holocaust. My mind is in shock. How are these events even possible? The more I hear, the more I fight the urge to run out of the room.

I think evil must exist in human nature, just as decency must, and we choose which is to be in our behavior. If the Nazis had the idea they were doing a good deed by killing children for being useless, they gained the freedom to rationalize their horrible behavior. My mind is incapable of understanding how one slaughters unarmed, innocent people, but I am autistic so maybe I don’t have the talent that neuro-typical people do to justify and rationalize the incomprehensible. I try to make it make sense. I cannot.

I realize, even now, that evil must be faced head on. We must work to treat others decently. I hope humanity will overcome our cruel nature one day.

Challenge

Every day of my life I face a kind of moral dilemma. My autism makes self control very difficult. It takes more effort to sit still in class than to do the intellectual work. I have big personal goals for myself. I prefer to have a full life than a hidden, bored one in some remedial class like most other severely autistic people. It is my mission to help them get an education too. None of this is a dilemma. I am clear on my goals, but I struggle morally with my inner forces. My body is programmed in a different way than typical people. It has internal orders that differ from my mind's intentions. My struggle to control myself is to be kind to others, thoughtful of the space of others and not disruptive in class. Each day I remind myself to do this because it is the right thing to do in spite of how hard it is to accomplish.