Page 271 - The Social Animal

6

Human Aggression

More than 40 years ago, at the height of the disastrous war our coun-
try was waging in Southeast Asia, I was watching the news on tele-
vision. The anchorman (the inimitable Walter Cronkite) was
reporting an incident in which U.S. planes dropped napalm on a vil-
lage in South Vietnam believed to be a Vietcong stronghold. My son
Hal, who was about 10 years old at the time, asked brightly, “Hey,
Dad, what’s napalm?”
“Oh,” I answered casually, “as I understand it, it’s a chemical that
burns people; it also sticks so that if it gets on your skin, you can’t re-
move it.” And I continued to watch the news.
A few minutes later, I happened to glance at Hal and saw tears
streaming down his face. Struck by his pain and grief, I grew dis-
mayed as I began to wonder what had happened to me. Had I be-
come so brutalized that I could answer my son’s question so
matter-of-factly—as if he had asked me how a baseball is made or
how a leaf functions? Had I become so accustomed to human bru-
tality that I could be casual in its presence?
In a sense, it is not surprising. The people of my generation have
lived through an era of unspeakable horrors—the Holocaust in Eu-
rope, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the
Korean War, and the war in Southeast Asia, and the Middle East—
to name a few. In the ensuing years, we have also borne witness to
several brutal civil wars in Central America; the slaughter of more
than one million civilians in the killing fields of Cambodia; “ethnic
cleansing” in Bosnia; the bloodbaths in Rwanda, Sudan, and Alge-
ria; the suicide attacks of September 11 on our own soil, and Amer-
ican retaliations in Afghanistan and Iraq; and on and on and on. As