I thought about it.

I remember thinking about how to make the other kids pay. How to get the last word. How to punish them for being mean to me and bullying. How to make a statement, that no one would ever forget.

Yeah, I thought about it. I Wonder how many other kids have, if they were honest?

Things were difficult at home. Violence and chaos. Drinking and drugs. I inherited/learned a mean streak. I'd killed other things. I had access to guns. I looked up how to make bombs in books. I was pretty sure I could do it.

There is a time when you just want it to end. You don't care what that looks like. You rationalize that if you just do one big thing: then finally, someone will have to do something...and the situation that seems endless and unsolvable; will at least be different. And at that point, any kind of "different" seems better than your current reality. You, and the other victims of the situation at home will finally be "free". And people will finally hear your pain.

Now that I'm older, and understand more.  I realize a lot of what I describe above is simply frontal lobe development. Immaturity mixed with a small amount of life experience that makes each day a large percentage of your life experience to that point. A month or year of bad times, is an eternity when you are young. Hopelessness comes pretty quickly.

But I didn't do it. Wonder why?

Some people might not like the answer, but I think God had a lot to do with it.

I wasn't a religious kids. I'm not a religious adult.  In fact, I hated church and CCD and all those Christian exercises that seemed like torture to me. But enough sunk in during my sentence at Sunday School and during my conversations with adults; that I was scared enough about the afterlife to give me pause.

Granted; I didn't have some of the factors that kids today have. I didn't have prescription "mood" drugs being handed out like candy. I didn't have opportunity to play Halo for five days straight; until I'm a hypnotized, homocidal, zombie that can't tell reality from fantacy. Had I had those factors, maybe things would have gone differently. Who knows?

But, what I did have was just enough fear of eternal damnation to give me pause. Do people still have that today?

Even if it's total bullshit, and death is just a terminal dirt nap and all that happens is we turn to worm food: might a young, undeveloped mind...just a little scared of fire and brimstone...still have value as a deterent until that frontal lobe kicks in?

I have to wonder. A tool is a tool. Like it or not, if it's effective, do you quibble about the tactic?  Might young men murdering been a problem historically, that necessitated the "invention" of religion?

And before you get crazy, because I'm using the "R-word"; remember, just about all of you parents lie directly to your kids about Santa and the Easter Bunny. Would another questionable tale: that could save their life and the lives of many other children really be outside of what you are capable of doing as a parent?  Or is that just too much to ask?