Pure, blind, furious hatred.

Last week I found out that my professor was arrested for owning child pornography.

This week, I found out that he has been accused of being a baby rapist.

It is surreal and devastating to type those words, because I trusted, respected, and genuinely cared about him. Having been unemployed for a year, my classmates and professors have taken on the de facto role of friends to me. I feel naive and betrayed, but above all I cannot fathom the insanely evil things he has done. There is an article here that explains the general details, but I must include a warning that this case is easily the most f*cked up, disturbing thing I have ever read.

I am fortunate enough that I have never been exposed to anything remotely horrifying in my life. I have been sheltered from so many evil realities that I am often blindsided by harsh truths, and I have not developed a thick skin about ANYTHING. I have recognized myself moving through the stages of grief over the past week, almost in the same way that I would if he had died. In most ways, he has died.

His name is Ken Kyle, and he taught what I referred to as our "fun classes." Our program provides a good mix of theoretical and practical coursework, so his job was to dabble in way-out-there concepts that somehow-kinda related to organizational theory and public policy. Most of the time, we just sat around talking about politics and writing essays about whatever the heck we wanted. I appreciated that I always received an easy A from him, and that he always respected our opinions even when he did not agree with them.

He was a Southern gentleman from Louisiana, with a polite drawl and all of the manners you would expect of someone raised in the South. When I look at the national news articles and read comments that talk about him being a "liberal from San Francisco," I get so angry because he most certainly was NOT a product of my hometown. There have also been comments about how his students are "probably all ghetto thugs on scholarships," since he teaches at a poor state university. I just have to laugh at the ridiculousness of those comments, because most of my classmates are definitely white, suburban, middle-class government employees.

I have talked out my feelings several times over the past week with friends, and I thought that I had finally reached some sense of peace. I was floored yesterday when I received the email from my classmate, with information about his crimes in St. Louis. I literally gagged on my lunch, and had to choke down a sob as I tried to push thoughts and images from my head. This disgusting psychopath was my friend, and I never had any clue. This little girl could have been saved if one of us had just seen a glimmer of the monster that he is.

I am considering talking to a counselor next week, during the first week of my last quarter of grad school. My classmates are also organizing a get together to sort through our feelings, and I think it will be particularly beneficial to me because I am such a sensitive wuss that I am unable to function when I am this upset. This is one of those times that I really wish I had a job so I could throw myself into busy work and forget about the nightmares that lurk in plain sight.

The best word to describe my emotional state is hatred. Pure, blind, furious hatred. I hope that he dies slowly, painfully, and at the hands of cruel rapist prisoners in San Quentin. I hope that they don't spare him one moment of torture, and that he is forced to confront the evil that he inflicted on an innocent child. I hope that in his last moments, he remembers all of the people that he betrayed and outright lied to for his entire life. I hope that bastard rots in hell.