But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you,
So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also."
I came across these words thumbing through The Prophet, and was ported to this story about Jeffery Johnson, the Empire State Building gunman. In it, Johnson’s mother talks about how she can’t comprehend how her kind-hearted little boy, “who loved the Boy Scouts and animals, and grew up into a patriotic and thoughtful man”, snapped and turned into a calculating murderer. Khalil Gibran’s uncomfortable thought is that the murderer was always in there, lurking inside the kind and thoughtful man.
David Brooks, the NYT’s conservative cloumnist, agrees with Khalil Gibran. Writing about Robert Bales, the American soldier who murdered sixteen sleeping Afghans in their family home, he quotes CS Lewis, who believed “there is no such thing as an ordinary person, each person you sit next to on the bus is capable of extraordinary horrors and extraordinary heroism.”
