Don't tell me that you weren't laughing on the inside when that girl who teased you all the way through your sophomore year couldn't get into any college. Or that you didn't always have that hatred buried under the fake friendliness towards a person who upset you a long time ago, avoiding to admit to yourself that you seek satisfaction.
Yes, that's the problem. Humans seek satisfaction; whether it is eating until you're full, or listening to the best piece of music, or reading the best novel or having your questions answered perfectly or getting back at someone because of something they did to you, it knows no limit. The worst kind of satisfaction we seek is revenge. It is a feeling we cannot resist, no matter how forgiving or gentle we may be. And it is a feeling, or rather an "impulse", that could make you do anything.
In a novel we read in class, a guy who gets betrayed by his accomplice serves his jail-time, and when he is out, his only goal is to kill his accomplice, who has married his now-former wife, to take revenge. Later, as he sees how things have changed, with the blink of an eye, he decides to kill someone who was one of his best friends. He is so desperate, so helpless, that he cannot accomplish anything. He kills two innocent people in vain, yet he still doesn't give up. He seeks refuge at his older connections, a girl who loves him dearly but who he doesn't feel the same about, and ends up changing her life drastically. Still, he doesn't give up until the very last minute... don't worry, no spoilers.
But sometimes revenge isn't all bad. Some people believe that being successful and having a nice life is the best way to get revenge from the people that tried to stop you from having it.
What makes revenge so special is that it blinds you, and it's creepy how much it's like love. When a person decides to take revenge, there is no stopping them. Similarly, when someone falls in love, nobody, except themselves, can snap them out of it. People are willing to do anything for revenge. People die for love. Yet one is a heart warming feeling that everyone has to experience, while one turns one's heart into a black oozing block of ice, beating only for revenge, for payback.
In the Islamic Law, they would ask the parent or the close friends of the deceased (victim) if the murderer should be executed. Now, we all know that revenge is a sweet, sweet thing, but the right thing to do here is to let the law treat the murderer and let him serve his time in prison........right?
Or to see him get executed, "not leaving your kin's blood on the ground", as they say in Turkish, an eye for an eye, and, oh, how gratifying would it be to know that the atrocious man who took your son, your only, beloved son away is now dead and burning in the depths of hell...
That is the revenge talking: blunting all your common sense and logic, stopping you from making any rational decision, that gruesome, unrelenting, red, hot sense of revenge. Revenge, sometimes only a show-off, a statement despite all the negativity and hindering, but sometimes, the only thing that pushes a man on, sometimes, the little devil sitting on your shoulder.
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