and to the folks who have chosen the "rugged path upward"
by Kathryn Ilsley-Shannon
No, this isn't a treatise on esoteric cults. It is about you and me and the neighbor next door. The witch hunts of today have different names, but each is still an attack on another person, to hurt or humiliate or ostracize.
These are the techniques of singling out an individual for oral or written attack who is disliked, feared, or envied.*
It is someone who might have, too often, something wanted and who stands in the way of the aggressor acquiring it. And so is born the modern-day Witch Hunter… one who attacks innocent people verbally, even physically (as bullies too often do).
The Huntsman seems to fear a power he suspects is intrinsic to the other... a power, in this day and age, that might come from another's success, talent, popularity, perhaps intelligence... an excellence which is threatening to anyone who feels there is an absence of it in his own character.
The Hunt. It’s not trivial and it’s virtually universal, because all of us have an atavistic instinct to exercise it. Why? It’s a survival tool which is a basic, and usually unconscious, self-protection and a shore-up of low self-esteem. It is a reaction to the most primal human emotion: Fear.
Most of us, I think, do not allow it to prevail; but enough people do for it to pose a dismal threat to our culture. The outcome is hurt, pain, and too often serious damage to the persons attacked.
In spite of the Hunter’s behavior which reveals his own inadequacies and labels his own insecurities, the modern Hunter of his “witches” continues blindly on his pursuit.
The Witch Hunt is a gesture of futility for the hunter. Will he and his "witch" discover this? And, if so, will it render powerless the poison the Hunter has generated?
Will he find that to damn another is to damn himself?
