The Worst in us All.

It was around eleven in New York City, and my friend and I were arriving at yet another bar on the Upper West Side. It was a little Irish place, relatively empty for a Friday night, but loaded with televisions overhead, half showing the Pacers-Pistons game and the other...well, in about thirty seconds no one would care what the other stations were playing.

I told my friend I needed to use the bathroom, and as I'm walking away I notice some movement out of the corner of my eye, not from the television, but from two guys on my other side. It was the movement of excitement and adrenaline, not unlike a dog on the hunt prickling up its ears. I followed their eyes to the television and, cliche or not, my jaw dropped. Ron Artest was jumping over seats followed by what seemed like half the basketball players on the court, and, at first glance, looked as if he was attacking some fans in the audience. Visions of the Bowe-Golota fight spun threw my mind, and I felt the deja vu in my stomach. Suddenly, the entire bar was enraptured by the televisions, and people I had never spoken to in my life were chatting with me, and I with them, as if we were co-workers, or long-lost high school peers.

"Do you believe that?"

"You see that punch?"

"Oh he's getting sued!"

"Are they pouring beer on them?"

It was one of those moments in time you remember because the raw emotion of the situation is infectious, and tangible. You cannot help but be trampled in its wake. It was like we were in the arena, and heaven help if the bar had been packed with guys feeling their beer muscles, and that's when something hit me. People talk about "the worst within us," well, this is it.

Laid out in front of all the world to see was the horrible truth--not just about Americans, or whites, or blacks or any group--that it only took a spark to send us back to howling animals--beasts who can smell terror, fear, and rage in the air and love it. As I watched the fans tossing their beers and sodas on a sheltered Artest, and Jermaine O'Neal I felt outrage, and a certain fear, but I also could feel the baser desire for the crowd to rend them apart, raise high the rafters and let them swing, an option that I'm sure would have been used had there not been what little security they had.

(Read up one day on lynching in the South--find out how it was a family event where after they burned, and hung the "criminal" they would rip them apart for souvenirs--and you'll see how far we've come.)

And that's what brings us to the point of this post. This drawing towards death and disorder, that we think is some province of the "3rd world" or Islamic Fundamentalism, is inherent in all of us and what's more, it may be something that we can never exterminate. When we spoke of Bush and his team, and, to some extent, Kerry appealing to our fears, it is to that beast that they are speaking of. It is to that creature that you say "Give us blood for blood, let us induce pain for pain." It is the whisper into the ear of that fan in the stands that says "Toss that beer down there, after all they really deserve it."

I say all this because in this age where we're supposed to be fighting "terror" and "terrorism" it is about time we really take a look a what these terms mean, and where they exist in the human psychology. We continue to think of this in terms of black and white, us and them, right and wrong, when this dynamic runs much more deep and contrived. It is an attribute that affects us all. Hoping to rid it from a person is futile, and the only thing you can do is try to encourage what Lincoln called "The better angels of our nature" (Who last night may have been Larry Brown and Rasheed Wallace {Yeah Rasheed Wallace}) to overcome our demons. It makes sense doesn't it, but how far have we come since Winston Churchill admonished the world with the dare to Hitler, "Let them do their worse, we shall do our best" to Bush and Kerry telling us, "Well kill all terrorists where they live."

If that's the case Bush better get started now, because there were alot of terrorists at that basketball game.

For more on the fight:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6534820/