Monsters used to live under your bed or in your closet.

Monsters, you thought, came from the tube or the big screen

and moved directly into your consciousness.

Monsters were bigger, more powerful and more dangerous than you.

Monsters had an evil agenda.

Then you grew up and you found out that monsters weren’t real.

Not that kind anyway.

Monsters lived instead in headlines, news-flashes and sound-bites.

Monsters lived in chemically unbalanced brains.

Monsters lived in ideologies and in beliefs found in people’s minds.

Monsters lived within the institutions that we thought made us safe.

Monsters, we later found out, came from the tube or the big screen

and moved directly into our consciousness.

Monsters are people in and out of control.

Most of the monsters in the world are people you see any day of the week.

6/2/95