Is There Really Anything New Under the Sun?

I see in the news today that North Korea is threatening “all-out war” after sinking a South Korean submarine last week. Somalia is still messed up and the Middle East continues its centuries-old slow boil. The US economy is on life-support and shows few solid signs of being able to take the IV of foreign loans out of the vein. Is any of this really new? I don’t think so.

Evil is consistent and always has the same game plan. Yes, I said the e-word because that’s what drives chaos. I believe evil is real just like love is real. Notice I didn’t say “good” as the flip side of evil. Good is a relative term and means different things to different people. For instance, many people thought Hitler’s reign of terror was a “good thing” to “cleanse Europe of the Semitic plague”. What’s good to you may not be good to me. However, love is an absolute and is the opposite of evil. The two forces are very real and they polarized. One is the absence of the other.

Evil has a set play book it uses. Examine great feats of evil over the centuries and you will find similarities. The killing fields of Cambodia/Laos are much like the concentration camps of Poland or the refugee exterminations in Angola. Mass killings like the Oklahoma City bombing and the events of 9/11 look a lot alike. Narrow that down to Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Ft. Hood and you still get the same playbook. The same X’s and O’s are on the whiteboard with the same score and the same defensive responses.

Why do we keep countering evil with the same old responses? Hindsight is 20/20 and you would think in the centuries of mankind, we would be able to recognize the warning signs and shut the door before the boogeyman was able to gain entrance. Part of our problem is we misidentify evil. We attribute evil’s characteristics to neutral things. I think we just don’t pay attention. We choose not to see things. We justify things under the guise of “tolerance” or “equality”.

Both my grandfather and my father were Korean veterans, yet here we are again fifty years later facing the same crap. Why? Because the evil people didn’t change. They were just contained and subdued for awhile. Why do people scream about Darfur when millions of babies are killed in this country every year? Because it’s trendy to scream about Darfur. Somehow, it’s not trendy to scream about China and the infanticide that occurs there. Nothing has changed - we just choose not to see it. It keeps us comfortable here in the richest country in the world. If I don't look at it, it's not real.

Why am I writing this? I guess I’m just sick of the whole thing. My generation has trucked along thinking common sense would eventually right the weird tilt the world has taken over the past thirty years before we all slid off the edge. Surely everyone else can see what we see, right? I’m starting to wonder.

Where is common sense? Who is going to stand up and call evil out for what it is – call a spade a spade? I think it’s up to those of us left who have not been deceived into not recognizing evil anymore. So much evil is lumped under “tolerance” or “open mindedness” or “humanism” when it should really be identified for what it is – evil.