I have been told that I am too negative. I have been told that I have a cynical view on humanity. I am willing to grant that this is true, but there are times when even the most cheerful of you must be willing to give me credit for being on to something.

You see, I believe that the civility by which most humans spend their day showing to everyone and everything around them is just a mask. It’s a mask about at thin as tissue paper. It does, I believe, a very poor job of hiding what is really beneath us. I think we put up this façade in the hopes of convincing ourselves that we have evolved. We want to feel superior to the animals that walk around us. We want to look at a male lion taking over a pride and killing the offspring and cubs of the previous pride leader and shake our heads and be glad that humans aren’t like that.

I don’t think that’s the case. I think if you were to reach back in time and pull one of our primitive, Neanderthal-like ancestors into the future the creature would probably recognize us as one of them. Sure the technology and much of what we do would be foreign to him or her but I think that he or she would also see us as we are. We are hateful, primitive, terrible things and our base nature is always lying just below the surface.

I bring this up because today the news was filled with the story of a madman who walked into a one-room schoolhouse in Amish territory in Pennsylvania and murdered seven girls. He left some rambling insane notes claiming he was getting some kind of revenge for some twenty-year old grudge he had. Whatever it was that drove him what did happen was that this man loaded up with guns and weapons and walked into a community. He walked into the school and asked the boys to help him carry his weapons into the schoolhouse. He then told the boys to leave. Then he lined the girls up against the wall and bound them. When the police showed up he opened fired. He killed five them outright and then shot himself. Two more girls died overnight.

I don’t know much about the Amish. I have seen movies about them but I am willing to bet not many people but those who are actually Amish really know what it means to be Amish. I do know that, generally, they seem like peace-loving folks. They really seem to want to separate themselves from the rest of society and live by themselves. Yes, they need a few tourist dollars but generally they seem to be the kind of people who would rather that everyone just left them alone.

For me there is no greater crime than killing a child. In at least two of my novels the central crime featured the death or deaths of children. I grant you it is a rather cheap and easy way to make a villain seem more villainous. I will grant you that this is why I have had my villains do such a thing. To me there is nothing more horrible and nothing more evil than a crime against a child.

You don’t just murder a child. You take away the future from all of us. Who knows what that child was going to grow up to be? What if that child was the one who would have found a way to cure some disease or bring about peace to the world? When you take away a child you take away something from all of us.

When I showed my book “Dust” to at least one person he came back and asked me about the ending. He wondered why I would write about a town that discovered a child murderer was in their midst the town tore itself apart. My cynicism was showing. I think it takes only the slightest push to tear through the tissue paper that we put over our animal-selves. Once it is ripped apart the animals come out and they feed. Too often we feed on ourselves.

I don’t know all of the reasons this man felt he was compelled to kill children. I don’t think anyone could ever really understand that. I do know that the animal within him tore through the tissue paper that he had been holding up for a long time. I heard reports that his friends and co-workers described him as a nice guy with a good sense of humor. As they say, it is always the quiet ones.

He was married as well. One report says he may have lost a child himself at some point in his life. Why that would then drive a man to murder children himself is something that will probably be asked for a long time.

Whenever a child is harmed it hurts everyone else. I see the stories of children who have been abused either physically or sexually. In many ways they are as harmed and as dead as though that are brutally murdered.

We like to believe, especially at this time of the year, that the monsters are all just things we make up. We talk about vampires and Frankenstein’s monster and werewolves and we laugh and jump in the movie theaters. We pretend that such things don’t exist. I remember being told by my mother that such monsters don’t exist. There are no werewolves and vampires and ghosts, I was told. Then something like this happens and I have to wonder if that’s true. Are the things we put on screen and write in books really things we just make up or are they aspect of ourselves we pretend are only fiction.

I remember where I was when I heard about Columbine. Each time something like that happens you wonder if it will be the last one. You hope it will be the last one but there is always something lurking in the back of the mind, like a tiny voice, that warns you that you know it won’t be the last one. You know that the next time the crimes will be more vicious. You know that the body count will be much higher. It’s like the sequel to one of those horror movies.

Since Columbine we have had 9/11. We have had the D.C. sniper killings. We have had countless school killings. Now we have had this tragedy. It is a tragedy that makes me want to weep, but I weep not just for the dead, but for the fact that it makes me realize I am right. Humanity is the monster lurking in the closet.

We can try to fight against it. We must fight against it, but to deny that it is there is to hide your head in the sand. We look outside for evil, but in truth, evil was born inside of us and that is where it continues to live.

Bryan W. Alaspa’s new novel Dust is now available at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.