I Don't Understand

   I've been surfing the internet for the past 30 minutes trying to find something else to write about. On the weekends I prefer to write about something light, something uplifting or something funny. Unfortunately what's been rolling around in my head for the past few days isn't any of those things.
   I had various topics I was thinking about. I could write about Scamp's trip to the vet yesterday. I could write about our sump pump and how it started working for the first time last week. (We've never needed it before.) My latest rosemary plant bit the dust yesterday, I could write about how frustrating it is to keep one of those alive. I could write about the frilly scarf I knitted.
  My mind still kept coming back to the same unfunny topic that hit me earlier in the week. It started when I saw an article about two preteen girls stabbing a third girl in Wisconsin. I read about it because I was curious. We had been to this town while on our last vacation. It is a nice town, well kept and pretty. It was getting its 15 minutes of fame, but not in the way it would like.
  There's been several articles about what motivated this crime. It has something to do with a horror website that at least two of the girls were into. I'm sure debates about the internet, censorship and violence are not too far away.
  That's not what's been tickling the corner of my mind the past week. The thing I'm truly bothered by is that the girls who stabbed their friend didn't seem to have any concept that what they were doing is wrong. Once they had finished they left the girl to die. Fortunately she was found by someone. She was given medical care and is improving and talking.
  I can't wrap my mind around the concept of someone not knowing that killing or even seriously harming another human being is wrong. How is this possible? What kind of mind thinks like this?
 What kind of unbalanced person sees nothing wrong with stabbing someone 19 times and then just leaving them?
  What makes it even worse is that these girls are just that, girls. Not adults. I can remember, vaguely, when I was 12 years old. I would have been in seventh grade. My main concerns were getting what seemed like mountains of homework done each night and evading the bullies at school. As much as those bullies made my life a misery, I knew that it was wrong to hurt them. Not because it would make things worse, but because it was not the right thing to do. At age 12 I knew there was right and wrong. What has happened in the last 30 years that has changed this? I just don't know.
   I'm shouldn't be surprised actually. I knew one person who didn't have any moral code as far as I could see. If he enjoyed it, then it was all right. I must admit it fascinated me for a short period of time. I'd never met anyone like that before. If there was one, there must be more.
   As interesting as it was to contemplate doing what you wanted without having to think about how it would affect other people, I knew I could never live that way. It's wrong. It goes against the way I was raised and it goes against a lot of my instincts.
  I'm trying not to let this scare me too much. The challenge is that it seems like I'm seeing more news about people who kill others over things that seem rather small. When you have a job in a very public place it's hard not to be a little scared.  I don't know if someone who has to wait a couple extra minutes isn't going to blow a gasket and start firing on me or my staff. I have no way of knowing whether the person whose prescription is delayed by insurance or something else isn't going to follow me out to my car and try to stab me because he or she has been told "no" one too many times that day.
  There are probably some that would tell me that I'm being paranoid. What I'm seeing are aberrations. Things like that don't happen here. I hope that's true. The problem is, the people in the town in Wisconsin probably thought that too.......