The Evil that Men Do

The recent murders at Oxford High School in Michigan were reprehensible, despicable, and, perhaps, totally avoidable. But not avoidable for the reason too many people will leap towards.

The go-to excuse is the availability of guns. Yet while that is an understandable reaction, it is ultimately knee jerk. It fails to address a great many issues, and the first and foremost of those is that there is evil in the world. Take away every powerful, projectile firing object on earth, and you will still have evil. And it will not rest.

This does not mean that we cannot or should not fight it. But notice that we must first acknowledge it, we must admit that evil exists. Without that, all talk of preventing tragedies such as Oxford must be muted. Indeed, without that admission I don't see how we can ever possibly defeat evil.

What are we fighting, if not evil, if we are to usefully work towards avoiding future travesties of justice? You may have noticed in news reports that the parents and the shooter were called into a meeting the same day as the murders, because of alarming ideas expressed by the shooter. Yet he was allowed to stay in school nonetheless, because the school district as a core policy didn't want to deprive him of the academic and social support which formal education, in the mind of modern educators, asserts is paramount. So paramount in fact that questions of evil and evil intent are set aside. So much so that what was taken as a credible threat could not be removed from the building.

They can hardly argue that such an event was unthinkable. It happens too often, and surely was in the minds of the school people or they wouldn't have called the parents in, pulled the student from class, and had that meeting to begin with. Yet despite that acknowledgement, they could not see it within themselves to remove the shooter from the premises. They could not recognize evil, or even the mere potential for evil, preferring instead to leave it to take four lives and seriously injure many more.

We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst, C. S. Lewis wrote. Similarly, when we do not see that evil exists, we will not fight it. It is because we cannot.