Tootfinder

I Can See the Babies
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Whenever I see a person, my mind automatically conjures up an image of them as a baby. It's not really voluntary, nor is it the same as other mental imagery. More like I'm hallucinating a visual echo of their past self, floating in my vision near where I see the person. As if they were haunted and I could see the ghost.
It's all in my head, I'm pretty sure, and the babies aren't necessarily accurate. I checked once with a friend, and the baby I saw had curly hair even though all their baby pictures were bald. After seeing those pictures, my baby image of them changed, too, to match the pictures. So that's why... That's why I'm pretty sure...
But the babies are real, you know? I mean, my images of them might not be right, but all the people I see *were* babies. It's not like one of those stupid prophecy loopholes like "everyone was born of woman", you see, it's a true universal, no exceptions. And these hallucinations won't let me forget about that. Ever.
I tried to play a videogame once, one of those FPS games. My friends were all playing and they needed one more for their group. They didn't know about... this. I told them I didn't think I could do it, but I didn't want to tell them why, so they badgered me into it. I thought maybe I could handle it, I mean the characters were basically cartoons, right? But... well, I think I dissociated a bit and then threw up. Even if they were cartoons, all those babies, shooting and killing and dying, again and again. It's... it's not like the babies got injured, even, or played out exactly what the characters were doing. The babies just kinda floated around doing baby things, and they sort of faded out when their character died. No, what's overwhelming is the knowledge, the constant reminder, of everyone's former innocence.
The worst part, you know, the most horrible thing, is not just the innocence, it's the gap. Like, if you were to force me to watch a torture scene, I would hate seeing the victim, but it's the torturer that scares me. Everybody knows that horrible things happen to innocent people. We're all forced to think about that from time to time. But the thing almost nobody thinks about as much as me, is how innocent babies *become* monsters. How there's a hurricane of hurt and fear and apathy and indoctrination and hatred and prejudice and complicity out there that sucks in babies and twists them into racists and abusers and "business leaders" and soldiers and all sorts of people who hurt and kill others. The worst are the ones who take pleasure in that hurting, because the babies for sure don't. Like, how did that happen? And most people don't think about it, because they just label that person as "bad" and don't think about it any deeper. But you can't do that when you can see the baby right there. The baby isn't bad. The person might be, I'm not trying to say everyone's an angel or people don't deserve to reap what they sow. But the baby wasn't! Something between then and now went wrong, horribly wrong, and now you're stuck with a person that hurts others, and you need a drastic intervention just to stop them, let alone prevent them from doing that stuff again and change their future behavior. But you can *see*, or at least, I can see, that there was always some earlier point, some missed opportunity, where some much easier intervention could have headed the whole thing off. None of those babies are destined to turn into monsters, and that's the gap. The gap between the little baby that was and the monster in front of you on the screen or in real life.
Anyways that's it. That's my statement. I'm not a pacifist or anything, but I think you can see why I can't do it, I just can't. You can lock me up or punish me or whatever, but there's just no way you're gonna put a gun in my hands and give me an order and I'll just follow it, because I can see the babies.
#Microfiction