I was stood in a sandwich bar the other day, waiting for my order. Behind me a man was instructing one of the shop staff about what he wanted in his salad box. When he started speaking I turned around, the way we all often do – unthinkingly, with our mind mostly somewhere far away. The man’s voice was harsh-sounding and his appearance intimidating. Though an inch or two shorter than me, he was massively built with a neck that could have supported a mighty oak and that regulation skinhead haircut which the media has informed us we should associate with football hooligans and right wing, bovver-booted neo-Nazis.
I didn’t like him. Give us a dark alley and him a long Saturday filled with pint after pint of wife-beater, and just the threat of boredom would give him enough of a reason to make me into another statistic. But then I noticed something.
It was a tiny gesture, but it changed my opinion of him in a moment.
He licked his lips. Watching the shop guy move from one Tupperware container to another filling up his order, the man licked his lips. He was imagining how it would taste, maybe how it would feel as it slid down into his hungry stomach. I could relate; I had been having similar thoughts about the big, fat sandwich that was soon to be heading my way. And in that moment his ugly mug was a picture of beauty. Really, I say this without any hint of irony and in complete confidence of my own orientations: the man was beautiful.
I felt ashamed about having judged him so harshly and so quickly, about only seeing a monster when I should know that not only are we all complicated beings capable of a range of emotional extremes, positive and negative, but that appearances are deceptive – not every bad guy has a hooked nose, a bald head and a maniacal laugh. And… you know, vice versa.
Not that any of this necessarily excludes the possibility of Saturday night, the alley and wishes that I had stuck with karate when I was fifteen. But nonetheless I was troubled about our violent world as I headed back to work. What was it about life in our society that had helped to make me automatically so judgemental towards this guy? I guessed at least part of it was the overwhelming evidence that, time after time, we human beings visit horrific pain, death and torture upon one another, often seemingly for no other reason than the apparent pleasure of doing so. ‘Why?’ I asked myself again. And my thinking sort of went like this:

What’s wrong with us?

Why can such empathetic animals as we are so often revel in causing each other pain and suffering? Wars are fought all over the world for reasons which, if not condonable, can in some way be understood… Protecting what you have, taking someone else’s land, revenge, disagreements over the ownership of God. Well, maybe I can’t understand the last one so much. But what I certainly don’t get is the Saturday night punch up down the pub, the finding some poor guy who only wants to mind his own business and kicking him until he goes squishy.
British society clothes, feeds and houses most of us. The vast majority of people will have the chance to fall in love, to reproduce if they want to. So where is the need to fight, unless there is some dark and violent evil within us which requires satisfaction?

Did we grow up too fast?

Or maybe we all could do with recognising the monster within ourselves, the primal animal held in check by our laws, our three-piece suits and our suburban living. The adrenaline monster left unsatisfied by pixel violence or sporting competition is that same monster which did its fair part in ensuring our survival when we competed with all the other animals for the right to exist, and now it finds itself left out in the cold while its goody-two-shoes brother ‘superior brain capacity’ continues to be celebrated and gets to play with all the best toys.

We should be better than this.

‘But recognising our flaws is only ever half the battle,’ I thought to myself as I reached around in my pocket for my work keys.
So there I was struggling with a door handle, a Yale lock and arms full of goodies while being possessed of just the two hands; something had to give and, somewhat typically, it was the sandwich which flew from my grasp and splayed itself all over the filthy cobbles. Frustration boiled over within me and I felt my skin becoming like a claustrophobia-inducing barrier as anger rose inside, my muscles tensing up and suddenly screaming for action.
And I’ll tell you this: I really felt like hitting something at that moment. But I didn’t.