INTERFACING WITH EVIL: A Lesson from The Murder Of the American Sniper, Chris Kyle
As most of you know, the trial for Eddie Routh, the confessed killer of Chris Kyle and his Navy SEAL mate, Chad Littlefield, began last week.
Buried in this ghastly murder trial is a massive, whopping lesson for all of us to learn: especially, those of us who have to be around the likes of a Routh at work, or church, or in our own home.
This week we discovered…
- That Routh shot Kyle five times in the back and once in the head.
- In addition, it was revealed that Routh affirmed to cops that he’d “taken a couple of souls and had more to take.”
- Routh also rambled on to the police about “voodoo, hell, the apocalypse” and how “anarchy has been killing the world” and he wondered aloud to cops, “I don’t know if I’m going insane.”
- Aside from all of the aforementioned asininities, it also surfaced during the trial that two hours after he killed Chris and Chad he drove to Taco Bell, in Kyle’s stolen truck, and ordered two burritos.
- Lastly, we found out that Kyle and Littlefield knew he was dangerous.
Yep, divulged during this past week’s proceedings were the text messages between Kyle and his friend Littlefield as they drove to the gun-range while Routh rode in the back seat of Kyle’s pickup. Kyle texted Littlefield the following about the dipstick in the backseat: “This dude is straight up nuts.” Littlefield replied in a text, ‘He’s sitting right behind me. Watch my six” — which is military-speak for watch my back.
As you can imagine, Routh’s defense lawyer, Tom Moore, is going to use all of the above crap to “prove” that poor, Taco-Bell-loving Eddie didn’t know that executing Kyle and Littlefield, two men who were trying to help him, “was bad.”
Regardless of the outcome, in which I hope he’s found guilty of first-degree murder and gets the death penalty, there’s a big lesson tucked within this tawdry act, which is … trust your BS detector.
For whatever reason, and I’m guessing it was from pure benevolent motives, Kyle and Littlefield decided to continue on to the gun-range after acknowledging to each other, via texts, that the clown in the backseat was an evil clown. Yep, their BS Detector alerted Chris and Chad to the fact that malevolence was in their midst. This in no way faults Kyle or Littlefield who, with good intent, decided to continue on and try to unscramble Eddie’s eggs by spending time with him as they had successfully done with many others.
So what is your BS Detector?
Well, your BS Detector is that little voice inside your head telling you to listen to the little voice inside your head. It’s an internal salvific alarm alerting you to the fact that you’re in the presence of danger or evil or something twisted that has not your best interests at heart.
Your BS Detector is your friend. It can keep you from buying a crappy car or dating Kanye or voting for a Kenyan communist or from being scammed in a business deal and/or it could … save your life. Security expert Gavin de Becker called it, “The Gift of Fear”.
For example, several years ago a buddy and I went hunting wild boar on the Kissimmee River in central Florida. The trip was to be an afternoon and morning hunt with an overnight stay at the ranch in the double-wide they had for their hunters. Not five-star accommodations, but great boar hunting.
Prior to our arrival, our regular guide was called away from guiding us and they had some local Deliverance twenty-something oversee our hunt.
Initially, we didn’t know he was weird-as-hell, but after the hunt and as the evening wore on and this kook started getting wasted and talking about killing people, we decided at midnight to make the 3 ½ hour trek back home because this bastard was several bubbles off-level.
Now, mind you, I’m not some backward-looking, fearful, timid tit-mouse. I used to be a drug dealer, preached for years in jails to violent dudes, took Taekwondo for many years, went through insane hell when my daughter brought down ACORN, and I carry a gun everywhere I go. This wasn’t my first rodeo. My buddy Glenn is a fit, 6’6”, 50-year-old badass, who has been there and done that thirty times over and yet…this little freak freaked both of us out to such an extent that we made up a lie not to startle the midget mutant, just to get the heck out of Dodge. Who knows what would’ve happened? But what Glenn and I did know is that little SOB pinged our BS Detector.
All of us have been hardwired with a BS Detector. It doesn’t mean that we live a paranoid existence, but it does mean that we should pay attention to it when it’s telling us to abort whatever situation we’re in even though it goes against our senses and/or our benevolent desires.
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