Every day billions of us doom billions of us to death via kinetic energy. Most of the death-dealers don’t give it much thought, even when they’re squeegeeing off the mortal remains of their fellow creatures from their windshields.

We are killers, yet the ghosts of what we smash (or eat, or consign to starvation through eviction, or exterminate) don’t tend to haunt us. Our factory farms make a mockery of “reverence for life.” The havoc we have wreaked (or “reeked” as above) is all the more horrific for being commonplace.

And we name some of our children Alexander, and some others David. One dealt death wholesale, one retail (not Goliath; Uriah). It is no coincidence that Anthony Burgess named the berserker of his A Clockwork Orange Alex.

Socrates is said to have said “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

NOTE: Berni Wrightson and Mike Ploog are illustrators. Wrightson has worked with Stephen King, on Creepshow and The Stand and The Song of Susannah of the Dark Tower series. Ploog did some comic-book continuity in the horror genre as well; some of his panels from Werewolf by Night have been stuck in my memory for more than thirty years.