Last night while watching TV I happened to catch the Dateline special "To Catch a predator" and I thought that it was very interesting. In case someone reading this does not know what it was about, it is when Dateline puts together a sting operation to catch sexual predators. They actually get these adults to pose as children on the internet and then lure people to a house thinking that they may engage in some kind of sexual...something with these minors. The whole thing was really pretty sad to me and probably not because of the reason that people might think. I was pretty sad for the guys who got caught. Yeah, I know that is not a popular stance to take but seems my whole life, I have always been on the team of the underdog. Let me explain myself.

I think that most people would watch something like that and immediately start to pass judgment on the guys that were caught. Most people start to think thoughts about how sick these people must be to try something like that. Even the reporter was type judgmental and it seems that everybody is alright with that. Most people in the world think it's ok to hate murderers and rapist and child molesters. On the surface all we see are these "sick bastards" that just want to molest and rape our kids but I know it goes much deeper than that. If someone were to study this, I think that they would find that most if not all of these guys had some kind of trouble in their own youth. No, this is by no means an excuse for their actions but just an attempt to show that these people are not the one dimensional monsters that we are more comfortable with them being.

If we were to examine one of these "predators" closely and find out that they were in fact molested and raped as a youth, it makes one look at them differently. It now means that this person is not just a monster but only continuing a cycle of abuse that was placed on them. It is not so easy to just write them off as a "sick bastard". We are now forced to humanize this animal and maybe even feel compassion for them and that is the way it should be. Most of the guys that were seen last night knew that they were wrong and even knew that they should not engage in what they were trying to do but they just couldn't help themselves. Again, I am not saying that these people aren't wrong for their actions but what I am saying is that they need to be understood and not just disregarded.

Just throwing people in jail and humiliating them on TV is not enough to stop these people from doing what they do. As was shown on the show last night, many of the guys were second time offenders and had already been caught once before. As everyone knows, I am a strong advocate of living in the truth. People need to come to terms with their issues and face them head on and even share them with people so that they don't have to face them alone. I think peoples inner turmoil thrive in secrecy and that is one reason that we need to live in the truth. If we tell someone what our struggle is then we have someone in the fight to help us. When we keep it inside we have to try to deal with it by ourselves and the flesh is sometimes so weak.

anyway, I need to stop here and pick topic up on a later date.