Seriously, what is wrong with people?

In case you hadn't heard, a bomb has gone off in Moscow's Domedovo airport, killing at least 35 people and injuring hundreds. I was wondering what to post about for this week, and the world did not fail to disappoint. Some days, I really, really wonder why I even get out of bed.

Seriously, what is wrong with people? I don't understand. I don't understand people's desire to harm each other. To kill. To oppress. To fuck each other over. I do. Not. Understand.

I mean, I understand that there's all kinds of factors that can motivate people to do almost anything, and when your day to day life is about nothing more than survival, as it is for billions of people on our planet, everything else becomes secondary to your situation. I get that. I get that there are all kinds of reasons groups of people hate each other -- politics, religion, history.... Most of the time it's history, people fucking each other over for generation after generation after generation. In a lot of places, most people don't even remember what the original offenses were, it's just always been this way. Even if people can recount what Those Others Did, it's frequently hard to see how those Original Offenses still matter, beyond the self-sustaining engine of hate that has continued ever since.

And believe me, I get hate. I have people I hate. People I think are vile, irredeemable pieces of human filth. Some of them I hate even though I don't know them, haven't ever met them, and they've never done anything to me personally -- they've just publicly demonstrated themselves to be vile people. Some of them, it is personal. People who've hurt me deeply, personally and profoundly. People I used to consider close friends.

And I still don't understand this impulse to harm and murder, lie and betray. It just doesn't make a lick of sense to me.

That hate I hold toward other people harms only myself ultimately. Certainly the hate I hold for people I once called friends is primarily directed inward, wondering what is was about me that made people I cared about, and who claimed to care about me be so nasty and vile to me. The only person who suffers for that is me. I work to let it go, and that's very hard.

But harming someone else?

It's almost easier to wrap my head around Jared Lee Loughner, his brain is demonstrably broken. But there are perfectly "sane" people who are more than willing to harm others without much hesitation or remorse, and that's what I just don't get.

Somebody? Anybody? Thoughts?