Serial Painters

     Wouldn’t it be terrible if we were all on display? If we were all forced to compete in a never-ending contest and we had no say in what was being judged about us? Wouldn’t it be terrible if there were an impossibly high standard to reach, a picture of perfection, even if no one had control over meeting this standard? If we were hated and demeaned every time we failed to reach this standard?

     Wouldn’t it be terrible if the judge were an artist, and every time he judged, he took his brush and painted us a picture of how awful we look, comparing us to the standard of perfection, highlighting our supposed flaws, and exaggerating them like a caricature? If the artist gave us the picture he had painted, told us to pin it to our chests like a derogatory sign? If we had to carry this sign with us wherever we went, and every time we looked in the mirror, instead of our faces, we just saw the hideously cruel painting? Wouldn’t it be terrible?

     Wouldn’t it be horrible if the painter began targeting children? If he took his brush and smeared gaudy strokes on his canvas, until he had fabricated an image of humiliation for the child to wear? Wouldn’t it be horrible if other children stapled the image to the child’s chest, ensuring it never fell away, mocking his every awkward step, ungainly appearance, unsightly birthmark? If they attacked and sneered at his shortness and physical weakness, or laughed at her late-blossoming womanhood? If they kicked down the smaller and weaker, with every kick adding a stroke or smear to the dirty, ugly painting? Wouldn’t it be horrible?

     Wouldn’t it be ghastly if the painter went after young women? If he dipped his cruel brush into his horrid ink, and streaked up his punishing canvas an image of ugliness for the young woman to wear? Wouldn’t it be ghastly if the painter told her she was fat, awkward, and ugly? If he communicated through his twisted masterpiece complete disgust and revulsion at her inability to match the image of perfection, and how perfectly worthless she was for it? What if she started believing it? Wouldn’t it be ghastly if other women grabbed their own brushes too? If they drew attention away from their own terrible canvases by smearing mud and hate on the loathsome paintings of others? Wouldn’t it be ghastly if they laughed and mocked and hated, with each sneer and jibe adding an ugly array of bruise-like blotches to the young woman’s mauled and mangled painting? What if she couldn’t see her beauty? What if when she looked in the mirror, the painting hid her loveliness? If she forgot who she truly was because of whom she was afraid of being? If she was afraid of being herself, because the painter told her that only the ones that match the Perfect Canvas are beautiful? If she believed his lies, what then? Would it not be ghastly?

     Wouldn’t it be evil if the painter directed his venom toward emotional men? If he sloshed some paint across the canvas, streaking and smearing with furious hatred, manufacturing an image of weakness? Wouldn’t it be evil if he told sensitive men that they were not truly men if they shed any tears? That experiencing emotional pain was detrimental to becoming a man, and showing emotion earned a “man up!” Wouldn’t it be evil if these emotional men were forced to wear a canvas, a sign that said “I am not a man”? If, in the shadow of their canvases, they accepted the lie that they were weak, childish, and pathetic, wouldn’t it be evil?

     Wouldn’t it be terrible if we recognized the truth? If we understood that we are the painters, we are the serial killers of society. If our words were our hateful paintings, and our tongues the diabolical brushes? If our standards of bravery, beauty, and manliness were just a Perfect Canvas, and our judgmental comparisons were our smears of permanent hatred? Wouldn’t it be evil if our society was homicidal? If children destroyed each other, young women destroyed each other, and grown men destroyed each other? If our words caused men, women, and children to look in the mirror with loathing and see only our evil pictures of something they are not? Wouldn’t it be terrible, ghastly, and evil if these things were real, if they were true, and if you and I were serial killing painters of hatred?

No it would not be.

For it already is.