Post #2: Nobody is 100% good or evil

Humans aren't perfect. They also aren't the opposite of perfect (I don't mean flawed or imperfect, I mean the absolute polar opposite of perfection. That is, to be completely useless and flawed. It's a concept which is beginning to hurt my head to think about, like the size of space. Ouch.) Anyway, humans are a combination of both good and bad. Maybe not a fifty-fifty split because that's still perfection in a sense. The mixture varies from person to person based on billions of factors and conditions.

After that philosophical rant, I'd like to explain what it has to do with The Glass Castle. I'd like to point out that it would be easy to fill these blog posts with my reactions to the terrible things that Rex Walls, the author's father, does. It'd be easy to call him an awful person and move on. But the thing is, Rex Walls isn't a rotten human being. Nobody is rotten. People simply behave rotten from time to time. This concept also applies to adjectives such as "nice", "friendly", and any other adjective that is used describe a human's personality.

Rex Walls drinks, makes threats to hurt his wife, drowns kittens, makes up stories about him being a hero, and forces his kids to lose their childhood by teaching them the hard truths of life. But while those actions are generally viewed as unacceptable, there is always another side to them. Alcohol is addicting and maybe he can't stop. He loves his wife and rescued the kittens then decided to drown them. He just wants to make his kids think he was an amazing dad and doesn't want them to grow up not knowing what's out in the real world. Maybe these are merely excuses that don't give him the right to do those actions. But I've got to admit, his heart seems to be in the right place. Some of his actions show he tries to hard to be a good person. For example, Rex rescues a lot of cats. He tries to help them but when they reproduce and become too much to handle he kills them. He started out doing a good deed but tried too hard, saved too many cats, and the alcohol probably let him think it was okay to drown the cats.

That is why I wholeheartedly believe that no person is entirely good or bad. Each person is a mix of both and that's just the way it is.