“When we rest our eyes stay open. We are always off to war.” – Ferron, “Misty Mountain”

We heard about the attacks in Balboa Park after the festival let out on the Saturday night of Pride weekend. My wife kept up with the details in the newspaper. She is a Libra, and justice is so very important to her. In the days following the attacks, she became more and more despondent.

“We think things have changed. Nothing has,” she said. “People still hate us. They want us dead. And the worst thing is that we all just accept it as normal.”

Meanwhile, Mel Gibson was caught flashing ass in Malibu and the unified response by the Jewish community really knocked me out. As one body, they stood up and demanded an apology.

“That’s how we should be,” I told the wife, “That’s the only way a minority group gets respect and power – speaking in one big voice.”

So when we heard about the rally, we decided to make the trek to The Center, just to add our voice to the volume and two more bodies to the mass.

Everybody has heard about the rally. It was packed, the speakers were passionate and the messages came through loud and clear, from Mayor Sanders on down. “No turning back,” “A hate crime is a hate crime whether it’s based on sexual orientation, race or religion” and “Stop the hate crime before it happens, with education and enlightenment.”

All really good points. But they forgot about the 10 Percenters. Who are the 10 Percenters?

I first heard about them in an interview on National Public Radio in 1994. A general working for the United Nations was responding to questions about the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The interviewer couldn’t believe the war crimes – the rape camps, the torture and the cold-blooded massacres. But what she found most unbelievable was that, almost overnight, people who had lived together as neighbors for generations, even intermarried, suddenly rose up and killed each other.

“How does this happen?” the reporter asked.

The general paused, took a deep breath and said: “I have come to the conclusion that 10 percent of the human race are monsters. I have traveled to conflicts and war zones all over the world, and I find these monsters everywhere.”

He said that, unlike Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, these psychopaths are afraid to act on their impulses because of the consequences of prison or execution. Instead, they wait for a break, some time when society is unable to keep a close eye on them. It is usually a war or a riot, some kind of chaotic breakdown in law and order, but it can also be a neglected urban area or an isolated rural area. Then the 10 Percenters come out to play.

If these monsters have acquired some authority – as a politician, a law enforcement or military officer, a cleric or an older member of a street gang – then they can use their underlings to expand the scope of their psychotic behavior. So then you have My Lai, Rwanda, Auschwitz, the Inquisition and hate crimes in which a 24-year-old convinces a 15-year-old that beating a gay guy with a baseball bat is a good thing.

According to this general, there is no amount of education or enlightenment that will cure these people. They have no interest in right or wrong. If Jesus drove up in a shiny new Mack truck and decreed that gays (or blacks, or women, or Jews…) are God’s chosen people and not to be killed, beaten or raped, it wouldn’t matter a lick. They get their joy from others’ pain.

It takes two things to keep these predators under control. First, the laws against violent behavior have to be strong, clear and enforced. The monsters must never think the law will look the other way when they beat a gay guy or drag a black man behind a truck.

Second, the fear that weakens society has to be removed. People who believe minorities threaten them are ripe for the picking. Some fear that immigrants will take all their jobs, some fear that gays have an “agenda,” and lots of people fear that everlasting Hell and damnation await them if they don’t do what the “preacher-monster” tells them to do.

It requires more than prayer and wishful thinking to reach these two goals. It requires courage, vigilance and action. The “war on terror” begins right here. In San Diego, in California, in the U.S.A.

State Senator Christine Kehoe warned at the rally, “We can never say we’re done, it’s over.” We have to make our voices heard and speak up for everyone who is a victim of a hate crime. That’s how we keep the 10 Percenters in their closet.