One of the salient bilingual refrains I recall hearing growing up was how it takes one bad apple to spoil the bushel or “una manzana podrida pudre a las demás”. I hated the connotation because it was always used in reference to that “one friend” who could lead everyone astray, and you just had to get rid of that “friend”.

At the time, I resented my teachers, grandparents, parents, priests, nuns all pointing out to the importance of dumping that “rotten apple”, because sometimes fingers were pointed towards someone I knew and liked. And, of course, I knew better!

Lately, though, I have been engaging in retrospection trying to understand why some people whom one considers friends – who one might have spent time sharing a meal, a warm home, indulging in “old stories” and caring about “old woes”, the ails and ailments and deaths of other friends and children – can perversely aid and abet lies and treacherous behavior, and actually eagerly encourage the ruination of entire families of friends, acquaintances, colleagues, etc., just because. There seems to be a sadistic pleasure in this indulgence…and no compassion for any one of the victims.

Of course, this treachery is as old as the Bible and literature is chock full of these unsavory characters. So, as I am indulging in research for a narrative about this despicable behavior, lo and behold, I discovered a new thing: the “Judas goat”! I had never heard of it.

A Judas goat is raised with the sheep so that it will eventually gain their trust and when the time comes the Judas goat will lead the sheep to the slaughterhouse itself.

So now I need to study this phenomenon more, because I realize that “friends” who act in such a dishonest way, are truly Judas goats who operate because of their dark and rotten ulterior motives, whether they dislike the person/persons they are betraying, or whether they have misbehaved and need to cover their own tracks…that is, tit-for-tat.

However, the irony of ironies is that the Judas goat’s service is finite, and eventually it exhausts its usefulness. And then? Ah, their own masters end up sending them off to their miserable end.

I feel sorry for the Judas goat. After all, it is just a goat that has been trained to fulfill an animal husbandry purpose. However, the human Judas goat, well…now that is another story!

(A journal entry – September 10, 2024).