Those We Call Monsters

Click here to read without metaphors!

They did something terrible.

You don’t need me to tell you what.

You already know who they are.

Their face formed in your mind the moment you read that first line.

Maybe it’s one face. Maybe it’s a crowd. Maybe it’s an entire belief system that moves like smoke and sounds like power. You can see their hands — the ones that did the unforgivable thing. You can hear the words they used to justify it, the way they laughed, the way the world seemed to let them walk away untouched.

You remember what it felt like to see it happen. The hollow in your chest. The acid in your throat. The quiet, trembling rage that built while everyone else argued about nuance and context.

You know what you’d call it. You know what you’d call them.

Monsters.

You can feel that word in your mouth: heavy, satisfying, final.

It makes the chaos clean. It makes pain manageable. It draws a line between you and them, and for a moment, that separation feels like safety.

You want them to understand what they’ve done.

You want them to feel it — the fear, the grief, the violation.

You want them to look in the mirror and see what you see when you think of them.

You want their comfort stripped away. You want their world to tremble. You want their peace to shatter until they finally know what it’s like to live with the wound they gave you.

You wouldn’t call it revenge, not exactly. You’d call it balance.

You’d call it justice.

But look closely.

That desire — for them to suffer so they’ll finally understand — is the oldest trick the monster ever taught.

It’s the lie that keeps the wheel turning.

Because in that moment, without realizing it, you’ve become what you hate.

In someone else’s story, you are the monster now.

You might never hear that story told out loud. It might live in whispers, in the way they lower their voices when your name comes up, in the edge that creeps into their sentences when they talk about what you did.

To them, your certainty is cruelty. Your justice is persecution. Your refusal to forgive is proof of your corruption.

They tell their friends that you’ve gone too far.

They tell their children that people like you are dangerous.

They remember your words — the sharp, righteous ones you spoke when you were hurting — and they replay them as proof of your inhumanity.

You see yourself as avenger; they see you as executioner.

You see a demand for truth; they see a hunger for blood.

You see justice; they see zealotry.

And here’s the unbearable part: in their eyes, they’re not lying.

They believe it.

They believe it with the same conviction that fuels your own grief, your own rage, your own need to make things right.

That’s how the wheel turns.

Every revolution begins with a wound too deep to bear and a promise that this time will be different — that this time the pain will cleanse, that this time the punishment will heal.

But it never does.

The wound becomes inheritance.

The pain becomes purpose.

The victim becomes executioner, convinced that righteousness has justified the blade.

And still, the world does not heal.

Because the moment you begin to measure suffering in debts owed, you start building the next monster.

The moment your compassion narrows to those who deserve it, you start writing someone else’s nightmare.

You become the next chapter in a story told to justify another cruelty.

They will point to your anger the way you once pointed to theirs.

They will gather around the fire and tell themselves they had no choice.

They will take up your language, your symbols, your logic, and use them as armor while they do to you what you once dreamed of doing to them.

And as the wheel turns, each side convinced of its moral purity, the world bleeds a little more.

That’s where the cycle hides — in the quiet conviction that this time, our violence is holy.

That this time, we are the heroes.

That this time, the cruelty is deserved.

But every monster in history has said the same.

Every one believed they were cleansing the world, setting it right, defending what mattered most.

That’s the cruelest trick of all — the monster never knows what it is until the mirror cracks.

And when it does, when the smoke clears and the story travels beyond your control,

you start to hear it — your own name, carried in someone else’s mouth.

They whisper it in the dark and call you the monster.

They point to your cruelty, your blind spots, your tribe’s sins.

They tell their children that it was you who brought the ruin, you who cannot be redeemed.

And maybe they’re not entirely wrong.

Because the longer this goes on — the cycle of harm and vengeance, of outrage and applause — the more everyone begins to sound the same. The more every wound becomes an alibi for another. The more justice starts to look like punishment performed for an audience, and punishment starts to look like virtue.

We call it accountability.

They call it survival.

Both sides call it justice.

And the machine grinds on, feeding on pain, convinced that punishment will purify what empathy never could.

But punishment doesn’t heal.

It only repeats the wound.

This doesn’t mean there are no consequences.

Consequences can protect. They can restrain. They can rebuild safety.

But punishment — the version born of rage and spectacle — only deepens the fracture.

There is no justice that can undo what’s been done. There is only the decision to stop making new monsters.

And that is the hardest thing. Because healing the monster means seeing them as human again. It means letting go of the illusion that pain can balance pain. It means sitting in the unbearable tension between compassion and rage and choosing not to destroy what could still be mended.

It doesn’t mean forgetting.

It doesn’t mean excusing.

It doesn’t mean inviting harm back into the room.

It means refusing to believe that anyone deserves to suffer.

Not even them.

Especially not them.

Because the monster isn’t some alien thing. The monster is us — all of us — when we stop seeing each other as real. When we harden into certainty. When we take comfort in cruelty because it feels like control.

To heal the world, we have to heal what made them possible.

To end the cycle, we have to end it in ourselves.

And yes, it will hurt. Healing always does. It will feel like betrayal to those who still crave retribution. It will feel like weakness to those who mistake vengeance for strength. It will feel wrong, because the world has taught us that compassion must be earned, that mercy must be rationed.

But compassion isn’t surrender.

It isn’t naïve.

It’s the refusal to mirror the cruelty that broke you.

Maybe they don’t deserve it. Maybe we don’t either.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that if no one is worth saving, then nothing is.

So, we begin again.

We name the harm.

We hold the pain.

We protect the vulnerable.

We demand truth, but not blood.

We look at the monster and say: I see what you became. I see what you were. I will not become you.

Because even the monster bleeds.

And if we can remember that — if we can hold that truth without turning away —

then maybe, one day, the bleeding will finally stop.

🕊

---

The mirror doesn’t end here.

What comes next isn’t about them anymore — it’s about what we do with what they left behind.

The second part of this reflection begins where anger turns inward, and the line between justice and vengeance starts to blur.

Click to read "We Almost Become Them"

Note: I reject violence in all its forms. Nothing I write here is a call to arms, or a celebration of harm. These posts are warnings, not endorsements — an attempt to trace the patterns of power and propaganda so we might break the cycle, not fuel it. My writing is rooted in grief, in clarity, and in a stubborn refusal to give in to nihilism, cruelty, anger, or resentment. My love is for all people in this world — even those who would wish me harm.