The surprising truth about Rage Boy is that there is nothing at all surprising in his story. He is poor and uneducated. He has led an unsuccessful and unhappy life. He is from a region of the world that largely peaceful before Islamic radicals turned neighbor against neighbor one atrocity at a time, until the region became embroiled in bloody religious and ethnic conflicts. Most of the sorrows of his life stem from the fact that he is caught up in that bloody conflict. Most of us had already deduced those facts from the pictures of him, without having a smartypants journalist tell us. No surprises at all in the story.
Rage boy is precisely what is depicted in the picture: a grotesque caricature of what humans can be twisted into when the forces of evil exploit poverty, ignorance and sorrow. We pity him. And yes, we also laugh at him, because laughter is a gentle weapon that civilized people use to fight his kind of evil.
It is easy to pity him when he’s sitting alone on floor of his mother’s hut, but it is dangerous to underestimate the amount of evil he can perpetrate he’s with a mob of like minded fellows. He is exactly the kind of person that burnt Jewish businesses on Kristalnacht, that dragged peaceful businessmen and scholars through the streets during the Cultural Revolution, that filled the Killing Fields with 1/3 of Cambodia’s population, that slaughtered hundreds of thousands with machetes in Rwanda, and that stone women to death in Iran and Afghanistan today.
Well said.