thecages

Warning: melodrama ahead (I'm venting)

The poisonous vapour spat out by the wurk project machine has been particularly thick this morning [1].
The office is hot, overcrowded and noisy.
Everywhere you look you see death: in the greyed consultants' burnt-out eyes, in the frantic scurry of fluttering paper pilers, in just about every bored browser window.

The balance in this office has been destroyed.

The only words that I can find for it belong to Colonel Kurtz [2]:

I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen.
But you have no right to call me a murderer.
You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... but you have no right to judge me.
It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means.
Horror. Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends.
If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.
I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago.
We went into a camp to inoculate the children.
We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying.
He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm.
There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms.
And I remember... I... I... I cried. I wept like some grandmother.
I wanted to tear my teeth out.
I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it.
I never want to forget it. I never want to forget.
And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead.
And I thought: My God... the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that.
Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure.
And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters.
These were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that.
If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly.
You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment.
Because it's judgment that defeats us.

[voiceover] The horror... the horror...

[1] Observing this makes me feel like Chief Bromden
[2] Clearly none of my day-to-day watercooler horrors remotely compare to what Kurtz witnessed, but I have no other words for it.