Cruelty bred not born...

Something Brendan has said to me -- something I will need to work into the story in some way, be it Book Two or, probably, Book Three -- is that evil is not banal, like Hannah Arendt famously claimed: 

“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”

It may be Everett who mentions that to him, and he dismisses it. He comes to see evil as common and childish and lazy, not tedious or trite, because he was living through it. He sees it not as a failure to think or engage in consideration of what evil is; it's just easier to be evil than good. Especially because far too often a society will define that which is evil for others as good for itself...and in truth we are all basically products of our society.

For example, what Russia is doing in Ukraine is, to most of us on the West, quite evil. Bombing homes and hospitals and schools to kill as many men, women and children as they can in their war. Not soldiers; civilians. But in Russia, it's considered great and good and they laugh about it. They do not believe the people of Ukraine are worthy of human consideration, which would make it hard as hell for anyone in Russia to say, "No this isn't right." The few who have got carried off to jail, straightaway. How do you fight that when even your church overtly supports the slaughter?

This is also what happened in Northern Ireland. Ian Paisley, a Presbyterian ministers, a man of God, howled for the death and destruction of Catholics, and even threatened any politician who disagreed with his radical attitude. He whipped up riots and attacks and was a large part of the reason thousands died during the troubles. There was no one similar on the Catholic side, but the Protestant majority felt it was right and good to bomb Catholic pubs and kill Catholic women and children. And then they were infuriated and horrified when the same was done to Protestants by one of the IRA's branches.

As Jean Renoir once said, Everybody has their good reasons. And that is truer today than it was in 1939 on the cusp of WW2, at the beginning of Germany's happy establishment of the Holocaust. It's like it's man's true nature...and Brendan senses it and slowly sees himself joining in with it.

That is what he did not want when he was in Derry, and he thinks being in Houston will let him just be who he wants to be...and slowly learns it will not.