I went to bed, went to sleep, woke up, could not get back to sleep, and turned on the TV. The 1961 film The Ten Commandments was playing. I watched 5 minutes of it before I had to turn it off due to excessive over-acting. But during those 5 minutes, Moses (played by Charlton Heston) made this statement: "I am a stranger in a strange land."
That phrase took me instantly to the 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. The novel is excellent. In 2012, the US Library of Congress named it one of 88 “Books that Shaped America”.
It is no coincidence that a line from a movie is also the title of an unrelated novel. Both are taken from the Old Testament, Exodus 2:22.
And she bore him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.
The novel's protagonist, Valentine Michael Smith, shared some aspects of his life with that of Moses. He was, like Moses, a stranger in a strange land.
Having mused upon these facts, I turned to the Internet to browse the news and I came upon this tweet.
Parkland shooting suspect getting fan mail, money from supporters: report https://t.co/dYIFQzNQ9H pic.twitter.com/T0N8QvJtMn
— The Hill (@thehill) March 29, 2018
Fan mail. Money. Photos of women and teens wearing lingerie. Letters and photos from all over the world. I don’t understand it.
Indeed, there are times when I, too, feel like I am a “stranger in a strange land”. There are times when I feel like an alien sent to Earth to observe humans in all their variety and vagaries, their notions, their whims, their foolishness. I observe but often don’t understand. Why would any human admire a person who killed 17 young people in cold blood and wounded another 14?
I don’t know, but I’ll take a guess at the answer. There are different degrees of broken. Some people are very broken and some people are a little broken. With 7 billion people on our planet, there must be very many people who are a little broken. Those people can be fixed or at least be shown compassion. Very broken people — like mass shooters — cannot be fixed. They need to be sent back to the factory. I’m sure there are many people who would pay the postage.
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