busy day

I went to school for first, second, and half of third period and then i left to go see my therapist, Dr. Cena, who is so cool. I talked to him about some stuff for an hour and then i was going to go back to school but i would have only made it back in time to go to the second half of physics and TA so i thought that wasn't important enough to wast the gas to drive back so I went home and watched The Fellowship of the Ring with my dad for a while but i was super tired so i feel asleep right away. And i just went and got dressed because I'm going with my sister to her orientation thing for Arizona State, because she is going to be attending there next year. So i don't have time to talk about anything so I'm going to past in my essay about Ted Kaczynski. Hopefully you like it.

Servo Dementis an Contemno: The Redemption of a Killer


"This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a whimper."
- T.S. Eliot.

What began as a normal family dinner turned into one of the most impactful conversations I’ve ever taken part. Talking about our favorite TV show, Saving Grace, my mother had just briefly mentioned about Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh’s implicit connection to the series. My father had mixed up the names and thought the man who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City was named Ted Kaczynski. My mother quickly corrected him, “Kaczynski was the Unabomber.” Having never heard of the Unabomber before I asked my mother to explain. It was at this moment that my perspective on almost everything changed.
An extremely brilliant man, Ted Kaczynski, received an undergraduate degree from Harvard University and earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan. He became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley at age 25. But this man was deeply troubled and had a hard time fitting into the society around him therefore after working at Berkeley for only two years he resigned and moved to a remote cabin in Lincoln, Montana. Kaczynski was firm believer that society’s technological advances were responsible for the deteriorization of human rights and took it upon himself to draw attention to this injustice by sending self-made bombs to those he felt contributed to society’s failure. The Unabomber, nicknamed by the FBI previous to the discovery of Kaczynski’s identity, sent sixteen bombs in all; twenty four people were injured and three were killed over a span of seventeen years. Agents arrested Theodore Kaczynski on April 3, 1996 and he is now serving a life sentence without parole in the federal Administrative Maximum Facility supermax in Florence, Colorado.
Delving deeper into reports about Kaczynski and his bombings, I’ve come across a huge question that no one seems to have asked him: Does he regret his actions? As a follower of the Catholic faith, I’d like to think that if Kaczynski were really to regret his actions, even he could make his way to heaven. Redemption has been the main question in my mind. Can a person redeem themselves from anything? Will God truly forgive you for something as dire as taking another human’s life? Can someone forgive themselves for such an action? I like to think it's possible.
After reading the Unabomber’s manifesto, it’s hard to imagine that he could have any regrets because his issues are spilled out for all to see. The passion and the anger he felt emanates from the pages as obvious as the heat I feel on my skin on a sunny day. But I do not take it as another offense to keep him from being redeemed for many a person has written something in the heat of the moment that they regret later on, perhaps he doesn’t regret it now, maybe he never will but I think that deep down he can see that he acted foolishly (sorry if you take that as an understatement).
I don’t want this to become a sermon but I believe that God can see into this man’s soul and since God was his creator, he understands him in a way that no one else on this planet may be capable of. Using a different perspective, Kaczynski is not the enemy; his intent all along was to help people win back their deteriorating freedom from the technological advances we are making as a society. The revolutionary war involved the killing of some for the benefit of the whole, so Kaczynski saw the deaths as the route to rise above our self-created oppression. I’m just throwing out theories but after all this thinking I’ve decided that for my own self, I believe that the judicial system has no correlation with the after life- one who goes to jail is not hell-bound. I like to think that hell is one hundred percent empty- except for the devil down there with his lonely self. I’d like to believe that everyone- including people like Hitler and Fidel Castro are in heaven because God always knew, deep in their sub-conscious, lived regret.
This man shows the best and the worst of everything that is society, and it is just so disturbingly inviting that I feel this indescribable compulsion to stand up for this man. Kaczynski is a perfect example of how our society creates ‘the robber and punishes him when he steals.’ He was treated as an outcast and was forced to live on the margin of society. Am I the only who is picturing that one kid who sits alone at lunch and has no friends? Every school, every office, every person knows one of those people who is the outsider. Picture that person. Did they wake up one morning and decide that they would be the outcast? Of course not, we made them that way by punishing them for being different. Kaczynski was that kid. Kaczynski was the one with no friends. Kaczynski was the one who was different. Kaczynski was the one that paid the price for not conforming.
I know that I have no connection to any of those that were the victims of the Kaczynski’s bombs, and I acknowledge that the families and friends of those that were killed probably wish with their whole hearts that Kaczynski rots in the deepest pit of hell, but the anger which they hold onto are doing no good. Hatred can not bring the dead back to life, but forgiveness can bring back one’s good graces with the lord.
Am I looking too deeply into this man? No. My eyes have been opened and I understand how Kaczynski stood for something so much grander then himself. He stood for the freedoms of others, he stood for the outcast. I’m not trying to glorify this man, only point out how quickly we are to condemn a person to hell without taking into account that it was our mistakes that influenced their mistakes. I forgive Ted Kaczynski and I hope that Ted Kaczynski forgives society for making him the victim.








Gotta Go, Bye! <33