Lewis Carrol’s Queen of Hearts’ screams of, “Off with their heads!”, is an ingrained and recurring nightmare in the kid-scary part of the brain of most of us who read or saw some version of Alice’s Adventures. Descriptions and cinematic recreations of beheadments as capital punishment, (the infallible type), by guillotine in pre-revolutionary France or scimitar, scythe or machete by barbarians, drug lords and villainous slashers in folk tales, urban legends and horror fiction, have been used to shock us at our core. The reality of such an act of violence, or the unimaginable circumstance that could lead any individual to inflict it upon another is, for most of us, (I’m going out on an unsubstantiated limb by assuming it’s most of us), simply…well, unimaginable.

I’ve tried to quantify my own disgust to keep the bile in check. Capital punishment…well, that’s a long and complex debate; the Queen of Hearts stuff…that’s merely the epitome of bad sportsmanship, (croquet nonetheless); drug cartel violence…testosterone induced greedy rage. But this ISIS or ISSL, (can’t we even agree to call these fuckers by one name?), bullshit is the worst of the worst. In reality, it’s the most heinous manifestation of kidnapping and extortion, dangerously cloaked in the purported righteousness of being in the name of God or Allah or the Tooth Fairy. As a result of their actions, the grievances of these maniacal bullies, if ever they had weight and reason for discussion, can no longer be considered. Before we lose the last shred of our humanity, we must, all of us, band together to remove the inciters of unconscionable brutality whether in the guise of rebellious jihadists, murderous cartel kingpins, despotic villains or corporate opportunists. That violence begets violence is an unfortunate and sickening part of our nature, but the alternative is World War Z-ish.