News Nausea

If you are a Wisconsin resident, you are painfully aware of the Brendan Dassey trial that went to the jury today. For those of you visiting from other states, you can get the back-story here. His trial (and that of his uncle, Steven Avery) has led every news report for what seems like an eternity.

I admit to being a bit of a trial junkie. Perhaps because I had once considered becoming a lawyer, I grew up watching LA Law and still love shows like Law and Order. When I have the opportunity to see snippets of a real trial, I sit spellbound in front of my TV. But not this time. I have found both of the trials that have resulted from this unimaginable crime some of the most disturbing footage I have ever seen. The descriptions of the horrific acts that these men perpetrated against their victim are graphic and upsetting enough on their own. But it’s not the graphic testimony that is giving me nightmares and makes me physically nauseous. It’s the embodiment of pure evil that is being exhibited in the form of these two defendants.

I grew up Catholic. We went to CCD – our church’s version of Sunday School except it was on Saturday morning. We learned the basics about evil – the whole Devil banished from Heaven story. But there was not a lot of depth to it – even as we got older. I took a few classes in college that addressed evil, specifically ones relating to the Holocaust and Salem Witch Trails, but those left me with more questions than answers. My first teaching job was for a principal who, for sport I guess, would choose a couple of new teachers each year and make their lives hell. She would single them out and ridicule them in staff meetings, give them bad reviews, not support them with parents, you name it. She would keep it up until they either quit or she could gather enough “evidence” to fire them. I can remember the art teacher telling me that her experience with this principal had resulted in her doing quite a bit of reading on the subject of evil because she couldn’t come up with another explanation for why someone would be so cruel.

I realize my principal example pales in comparison to the acts being described in the Avery/Dassey trials or the atrocities perpetrated in the Holocaust. But all of these leave me desperately wanting to understand WHY? HOW? Is there such a figure as the devil? For me, that would be the preferable answer. Someone to blame, someone to battle. Someone who takes a person over and makes them do horrible things. But I fear that is too easy of an answer. More difficult to accept is the notion that this kind of evil is possible in any person. Possibly in every person. Even in the heart of a teenage boy like Brendan Dassey. To me, that is more chilling than anything any horror movie could come up with. It haunts my dreams. And it makes me turn the channel, so I don’t have to acknowledge that I have no clue how to protect my little boy from something that I don’t even understand myself.