What's scarier than All Hallows' Eve, a day some say we are closest to the underworld? More frightening than all the supernatural creatures and the havoc they may cause if unleashed? It's realizing the monsters are all around us.
As flawed beings, we sin. We stray from what we know is the right path to pursue a oh-so-fleeting idea of pleasure, not caring who it brings pain to. This occurs on every level of our society. At the commoner rung, it's an unfaithful relationship, leaving a lover scorned and doubting their self-worth for all eternity. At the more powerful level, politicians do what they must to grab power, spreading hate and lies and killing millions of people with their very words to get to the top.
What's scary is we justify each other's sins in order to cope. We pick sides, assigning a color to a belief system, and paint every sentence red or blue to see if it applies to us or can be used as a hostile attack against the other side. It's frightening that we stopped looking at what's best for society and just demand that we conform to either one extreme set of ideas or another.
We blame society for all of our problems. This big scary controlling factor. But it's just made up of us. We don't live in a society, we are society.
I don't know what to do with that information. Perhaps we need to abandon our beliefs and start anew. Perhaps that is too dangerous and eventually would lead to the same tumultuous terror. Where do we go from here? The scariest thing of all is no one knows.
