Tarot Stories #40: 10 of Swords

Now, most of the time you need only slay an enemy once, and that’s plenty, right? One enemy, one life, after all. In fact, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll remember that disabling an enemy is usually enough, and there’s no need to waste time with a killing blow.
 
Oh, you’ve heard that before, have you? Many times? Well, how nice for you.
 
As I said, all that is true most of the time. But sometimes – not often, mind – there’s an enemy that needs to be killed dead, as the saying ought to go. It’s rarely a person, this kind of enemy, but an idea. That’s the thing about ideas, see. They don’t die easy, and they live more than once. Worse than cats, that way. Worse than weeds, even.
 
So when those ideas are the enemy – and I think you know the kind of idea I mean well enough. I mean hateful, cruel ideas. Those people aren’t humans ideas. We’re putting ourselves above you ideas. Your kind doesn’t deserve to live ideas. When those ideas are your enemy, you don’t just wound them. You don’t just kill them once. You don’t bury them in the ground when they stop breathing for a minute, because those ideas have roots. You don’t put them in the dark because they take their sustenance in the dark.
 
No. No darkness for this enemy. No hiding it away or turning the page or placing it in the ground. You find an enemy like that? You fight it until it is dead and then you go to work on it. And once you finish the job, you put it out in the open, in the brightest lights you can find, and you tell your stories and you listen to others’ stories about that enemy and its ugliness and the damage it did and the people it killed.
 
And above all, don’t believe for a minute that the work is done. It’s never done. Not this work.