As I am driving home from the event
his words haunt every twitch in traffic:
On your way home, remember this:
for every hundred vehicles on the road there are
four drivers who don’t care if they kill you.
These are the psychopaths,
the emotionless ones
our race has needed to survive
who can kill without conscience:
we need them to defend us
as long as they don’t kill us.
I was reading about the kid (now nineteen
but still unnamed because he was a juvenile
when, for a thrill, he and an adult buddy
killed two just-retired teachers
at their summer cottage.)
He recently escaped for a few days,
was captured without incident,
cool as an ice pick or a shotgun in a drawer,
but they thought he was reforming in jail.
Don’t they read the literature?
Laws don’t stop psychopaths;
they just let us deal with them.
So, we need psychopaths,
but when they step out of line,
we can’t expect them to
react like the rest of humanity
and worry about it.
They can’t.
