The Boogieman

I don't know who created this, if you do please let me know so I can give proper credit.

     The Boogieman to some has been someone that doesn’t look like them. If you weren’t what they saw when they looked in the mirror, you were The Boogieman. Male or female, or black or white, it didn’t matter, different = bad.

After 9/11, The Boogieman had a new face for some; he was a terrorist, Middle Eastern looking and wanted to kill all Americans.

Neither example is 100% correct for the vast majority of people I know, however most of the people I know have experienced something similar.

We expect The Boogieman to look evil, we expect him to be frightening and scary, we don't expect him to look like he's a baby face child, we don't expect them to be clean cut people that we would see at the grocery store, and we don't expect him to look normal.

Jason wore a mask, Freddy Kruger had a scarred face, The KKK wore hoods, Jim Jones, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, the guy who shot up the movie theater in Colorado,  we want our crazy to look frightening and scary when we finally see them.

We don't want to believe that our neighbors, our friends, people we pass on the street could be evil. We don't want the face of evil to be the face of the boy next door or the girl next door or your teacher or your nurse or your doctor.

That is the comforting thought that gets us through the days and the nights, that we would know that we could see who the bad person was. We would know if somebody was crazy.

This is how we rationalize events like this.

Watching horrible events unfold in real-time brings this to the forefront of conversations. There is no normal, everyone is different and no one can tell who is crazy, damaged, out to get them, or harmless.

I have said crazy is crazy, way too many times in the past year. We have collectively watched a series of events unfold that have left children dead, families torn apart and all of it played out on tv.  These things do not happen because of movies, or bad parenting, or tv shows, or video games, or gun laws, or music. These things happen because The Boogieman has something not right in their brain. There is a damage somewhere that leaves The Boogieman without compassion, or a sense of right and wrong, or a sense of entitlement that they are the only person that matters on the planet.  The Boogieman is a broken person, a selfish asshole, a deluded zealot, or an arrogant fuck that wants attention.

I not only mourn for the people that have lost their lives, I mourn for the loss of our hard earned sense of security.

But I will not fear The Boogieman