Accepting the Thing
The thing looked perfectly normal on the outside. Nothing out of the ordinary. Certainly nothing worth killing over. So I cracked it open. What I saw made me kind of horrified. So I made an announcement that I would be ready to give the thing away if everyone who wanted it would show up. I would choose who got the thing. There were hundreds in attendance. With everyone looking on, I presented the object, Then, with everyone watching, I destroyed the thing.
I didn’t even want the damned thing. Someone let me know that I could have it, though. Whenever someone tells you something is free, there’s that little flinch. You think about maybe working it into your life somehow. It could be something really small. It could be something really big. You’d be a fool to pass up something for free, right? Even if you have no use for it, you begin to wonder if there isn’t some way that you could use it. It only makes sense. You’re human. Your...American so you think, “I don’t really want it, but as long as it’s free maybe I can find some use for it later.” That’s how I cam to be in possession of the thing.
Of course, I probably should have thought before accepting it. I know that now in retrospect. Everyone has a reason for doing everything. There is no irrationality. There are only those things that They may not always know what it is. They may even think they know why they’re doing something and be wrong. So it’s never certain why anyone does anything, but there’s always a reason. I should have thought of that when I accepted this thing for free.
Of course it was being given away for free for a reason. Evidently there were people who wanted it. The people who wanted it didn’t seem to care that I owned that damned thing now. They were absolutely determined to get it and they didn’t care about whether or not I was alive after they got it.
Obviously this wasn’t an ideal situation. Like I said...I didn’t even want this thing and there wee a whole bunch of people who would be wiling to kill to get their hands on it. I could have simply given it to any one of them, but for whatever reason I guess I opted not to. I wanted to hold on to it. It could have been for any reason at all, but I think the biggest reason was probably the fact that people were willing to kill for it. I think that was a big issue. I think that I wanted to hold onto it because if people were willing to kill for it they might be willing to do the unspeakable with the thing. And since I didn’t really know what it was, I really had no idea whether or not its possible uses might involve killing or destroying or mass destruction or whatever.
-Russ Bickerstaff
