Beware of those who traffic in rumors of villainy.  Their world is too simplistic to contain you.  This fact will be reason enough for them to debase your name in accusations.  They will do so first with laughter.  If this does not destroy your reputation, they will do so with their tears.  The world is crowded with stories of such coordinated infamy, history, mythology, fairy tale.  Good guys and bad guys have long battled over the heart of the world.  But a good man's integrity is determined by tests that he has never had to take; and a bad man's sins would be nothing within the revelations of another religion.  Those who cannot see nuance in others refuse to see contradiction in themselves.  The tenacity of this delusion affords them the luxury of hating without confessing the toxicity of hate.  In a dualistic paradigm, blame is an external that excuses them of their motivations.  If one believes in the devil, it is no longer necessary to look for humanity; the moral dilemmas assembled by real world feelings and circumstances are eclipsed by evil as a force.  And where evil is a force, the subtleties of human experience no longer matter. To the pawns in this dishonestly designed battle, their affiliation with the just cause (and both sides see themselves as warriors in the army of God) is a kind of fortunate accident that disguises the intrinsic egoism if not out right arrogance of their convictions.  In actuality, their is a fundamental cowardice in their facile world view.  The challenge of these real-world complications undermines their happiness by introducing ambiguity into action and word.

Justice Reconstituted

One person short of a genocide, the films director scans the crowd for another extra to rush through make up.  A dead panned expression auditions for the part while your right arm is a frantic flag.  Can a victim be a victim if the character itself is something they have cultivated for themselves, the part they pursued so aggressively (waving their inflated vitae and a variety of head shots under the nose of every agent and every sailor they encountered for three solid years), the role they were born to play?

Then, a maternal monster with flashing eyes and flaming tits hisses at me, "Nobody chooses to be a victim!"  She thinks I am a simpleton (and a racist, or a sexist, or simply null of all empathy beneath my calloused soul), but I am not suggesting superiority.  I am not here to resolve disputes like Solomon or Judge Judy.  

I align with the existence of both "extremes", but I don't buy the dichotomy that the see-saw might suggest.  It is not only the two weights that define the fulcrum's movement.  The weights, yes, but also the angle of the board, the lubricants, and the playfulness of the rider  Just as two children in a playground's trajectory will fill the air with laughter, justice--open to the idea that the interplay of social constructions complicates the comfort of a free-standing "truth"--hears the giggle and the scream with equality.   

Rejecting a facile dualism and respecting nuance and contradiction, we elevate the world.  We allow for the simultaneous existence of both entrapment and liberty.  And, not a judge ourselves we take no side of the law.  We have no agenda.  Thus, inside the mire of the client's messy system of beliefs, they are able to find a way out, a personal salvation that is more meaningful, living in the legends of his or her individual map of the soul.