On cruelty

I'm reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in my friend Robbie Grigg's book study.  Robbie is an impressive combination of charm, intellect and faith wrapped in a package that looks like one of the classier Greek gods.  Needless to say, I like being seen with him.  From time to time he leads a 'serious' book study at our Church that I go to every chance I get - I guess I need some leavening for my inherently frivolous nature.

There is a passage in the book where several drunken friends beat to death a pony that was not strong enough to pull them where they wanted to go.  It is a horrifying scene and brought tears to my eyes.  But after the tears dried I wasn't exactly sure what I had witnessed.  As an act of cruelty it didn't ring true to me.  I grew up - and from time to time do business - in very poor countries where cruelty happens out in the open.  But in all my years I have never seen anything approaching the beating described in the book.  In my experience cruelty down at the bottom looks very different than what the author portrayed.  It isn't hot, like the scene but unbearably cold, indifferent, implacable and unending.  No, after some reflection I believe that what Dostoevsky was portraying in that scene wasn't cruelty but madness.  The madness you would infer if you saw someone smashing their own car with a sledgehammer when it broke down.

Reading Dostoevsky's tale reminds me of a similar event I witnessed a few years ago that to my mind better illustrates cruelty's true nature.  I was riding in from the Lahore airport with my partner.  While I listened to him chatter gaily about our plans for the evening, I spied a donkey by the side of the road.  Donkeys are a major mode of transportation in the sub continent - they pull heavily laden two wheeled carts.  They are small and almost always overburdened, but so are their masters.

This donkey was different.  First, he was alone, not harnessed to a cart and with no owner in view.  Second, he was standing perfectly, unnaturally still.  I soon saw why:  next to him was a high curb that the donkey rested his right forelimb on.  Only the leg did not lie backward from the knee but forward.  Apparently, overburdened by the cart and moving too fast, the donkey had hit an obstacle that snapped his leg forward at the knee, it now lay sickeningly on the curb attached only by skin.  The donkey stood so still because to move must have been agony.  I looked for the owner but he was nowhere to be found.  I pieced together in my mind what must have happened:  the owner, finding his donkey fatally injured, had unharnessed him and taking the harness over his own shoulders, dragged the heavy cart step by agonizing step home - what else could he do?  He must have mourned the loss of his donkey - if not out of love, then out of a realization that the loss of his beast threatened ruin for his family.

So late at night on the busy airport road, the donkey stood:  in perfect stillness, perfect agony, waiting, alone and uncomprehending for its inevitable death.  I've seen (and sometimes participated in) quite a bit of cruelty in this world and I can tell you that this is what it looks like:  cold, dead indifference, physical, mental, spiritual agony by the side of a busy road filled with people who won't stop, won't help.  Unto death.

I looked away from the donkey and at myself in the rear view mirror:  blue-grey eyes, cold, indifferent and cruel stared back at me.  Had I any courage on that foggy Punjabi night, I would have stopped the car, gotten the tire iron out and beaten that donkey to death.

And that act would have been neither a cruelty nor a madness but a mercy.