My seven years old son told me that the bad guy in a movie was very strong.
I replied him, ‘He is strong, and that’s why he is a bad guy. If he is not strong, he doesn’t bother anyone too much and nobody recognizes him as a bad guy.’
Kids often talk about a movie or TV show they watched. Typically the main character overcomes all sorts of difficulties and achieves the happiness in peace and love at last. The trouble comes from ‘the bad side’, manmade or not. He fights with his faith, which wins the peers’ hearts and eventually the growing good side beats the bad side. The plot is quite orthodox in today’s entertaining movies and shows, well, as far as I know in North America and Japan.
But, doesn’t the bad guy have some reason why he can’t help insisting his wants? For example, a thief steals. If he has enough, or more accurately if he feels he has enough, he doesn’t have the reason and motivation to steal from someone else. If someone steals, it means she doesn’t feel she has enough. Although people around her think she has enough, if she doesn’t feel so, her desire to get more won’t stop. Some people steal to feed the hunger while the others don’t.
A story is always told by the story teller’s point of view. Whoever the story teller feels more sympathy for becomes the ‘good guy’. The other one that goes against the good guy’s life becomes bad.
In a way we are all a thief. We steal the life from other living creature. Most of us if not all, often without knowing, contribute the large corporations’ exploitation by purchasing their products. We do so to survive, to get our life going. We have our own reasons to live like this, and this is the life.
When a disease attacks us, we consider ourselves the victim. But, from the virus’ point of view, it’s their natural reproduction process, their survival. It’s the same way as we attack the other life forms to save ourselves. It is not the matter of good and bad.
When the attacker is strong, the attacker is called bad from the victim. But is it really so? When you go beyond this good or bad relationship, there is a different feeling. It is not a conflict but the unity.