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Revenge -- what is it? It is generally the desire to hurt someone as a result of having been hurt by them. Revenge, in other words, is about "getting even."
But it is far from that simple.
Let's use a trivial example. Someone I trust took a dollar from me, so I take a dollar from him. Then it is over. Everyone gets to experience theft. Everyone is where they started.
Except that isn't how it works.
If we use the dollar example, the revenge is usually to steal two dollars, or ten. Or the revenge for stealing a dollar is to throw away something the other person cares about. The ante gets upped.
And even with an upped ante, there is a feeling that things are not equal. After all, this was someone I trusted who stole that dollar. Letting him know that he can't trust me either doesn't make our hurt feelings go away.
There are entire books and websites dedicated to revenge -- revenge for women, for men, revenge in general, how to plot it, execute it, and how to avoid being caught. I'm not going to link to them because they give me the creeps.
Yet we all know the song (and probably liked it, too) in which Carrie Underwood tells us that her man will think twice about cheating after he sees what she did to his 4wheel drive.
My guess is that we all have reveled in revenge at one point or another. We've all heard stories about revenge that have even made us laugh. I recall one of a flight attendant who lived with her airline pilot lover. She discovered that he was cheating on her while he was on a long haul schedule, which means away from her and based in another city for a week or so at a time. One time when he left, she just dialed up a time-of-the-day line in England that did not disconnect, and let it run for a week while she moved out. He came home to an empty apartment, a five figure phone bill and a phone talking to the couch saying "It is now 1:30pm and 10 seconds ... It is now 1:30pm and 15 seconds ..."
But what did that accomplish? It sure surprised the pilot and made him pay out some money to the phone company. And he knew he had been found out.
But did that make life better for the flight attendant? Did she trust men more easily after that? Did she stop feeling betrayed? Was the pilot less likely to cheat, or just more careful? On some level, it probably did feel great because "gotchas" often do. But they can have some nasty backlash as well.
Oh Lordy, I know the feeling when revenge offers a sweet lure -- when you want the person who hurt you or who did something hurtful to really feel what they did -- or to feel ashamed of themselves -- or to have consequences to face of your particularly excruciating design.
In a recent column on BlogHer, Nordette Adams wrote an article that asked the question "Is Outing Members of the GLBT Community Ever O.K.?" in reference to a homophobic politician that had been outed as gay. Eventually the comments between us came to the issue of revenge -- and the spiritual damage it can cause.
I think we need to look closely at any act that makes us internally say, "Hurting him/her made me feel so good." Is that a statement we can feel proud of? And, beyond that, does revenge even work?
Sometimes it seems as though there is a thin membrane between an ethical life and a non-ethical one. When the membrane gets broken, it is easier to cross over the next time, and the next. The first lie is the hardest. The first cheat. The first revenge.
After the first "gotcha," the second one is easier. Maybe that one is even bigger. And then the third?
And in the meantime, have we taken time to
