Evil in Wheelchairs

I really, really don't care for inserting myself into the whole woke business. It's simply a morass which can only muddy everyone. Then something happens which makes me ask, who would even, ever think that? 

Doctor Who is a long running and generally entertaining British sci-fi franchise. The most recent version reintroduced a character called Davros. Davros has been around since 1975 and is evil. Very, disgustingly, despicably evil. He has also always been wheelchair bound.

They changed that. The new Davros can walk because, in the words of Russell Davies, the BBC executive currently in charge of Doctor Who, "We didn't like the imagery of the bad guy being in a wheelchair." 

He's on to something, you know. When I first saw Davros way back when my initial thought was, "Huh. Dave down the street must be evil because he's in a wheelchair..."

Of course that wasn't my first thought. I can't imagine that it was anybody's first thought. Nor their second, third, or eighty ninth. How twisted could a mind be to even draw that conclusion, that outrageous thought, from such a benign fact?

Do they, the woke crowd, actually mean this stuff? Are they that stupid, or do they in fact have an agenda? Sometimes I wonder.

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.

The Wrath of God or the acts of men?

Okay, here I go, trying to make a sensitive blog on a sensitive question. But such concerns have never stopped me before.

I've heard many times when something bad happens that it is God's punishment. I have similarly heard that God doesn't work that way. So what's fella to think? Does God punish or doesn't He? And the short answer is: He might, we just don't know if or when. And I think it's nonproductive to fret too much over that point.

Still, I think a better way to phrase the issue is, does God allow bad things to happen? Yet even then I'm not sure that allow is the correct term any more than I would automatically say that he causes them to happen. My point is sometimes things just happen, things which may be interpreted as punishment. And in fact, the corollary is also often true: sometimes good things just happen. It's interesting though that when good things happen folks aren't so quick to question the motives of the Almighty.

Be that as it may, the bottom line is that God wills what He wills, and we simply don't know when, where, and how He does that. Many if not most actions are simply the result of human free will, and nothing more. So how about we concede that we don't really know God's intent, but we do know our own, and work from there?

The Day After

There is evil in the world, and sometimes great evil. The events at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, prove that in a way which frightens us in a manner that is almost unspeakable.

The idea that our weakest yet most trusting citizens, our grade school children, can be subjected to such horrors is perhaps one of the most awful aspects of the school shootings. How can we explain such terrible things to those so young?

We really can't. There is no explanation for what happened yesterday. There may be reasons, but only bad ones at that. There simply isn't an answer to the question Why? Some will blame God; others, the lack of God. Others still may say merely that 'things happen'. At the end of the day we are right back to the problem of evil in the world. How do we handle that?

For starters, exactly as we are handling it now. We think of the kids, teachers, and families who are forever scarred by the tragedy and we help them however we can: prayers, aid, and sympathy. Then we remember the heroes who did what they could in light of such terrible circumstances: the teachers and administrators who did what they could to save who they could, by pulling students into classrooms or barring a classroom door with their body to keep the gunman out. Finally, we do what we can to help keep such attacks from happening in the future.

We do what we can; yet the specter of evil will always be present.

All we can ultimately do is rise above it. We Americans are quite good at that, when you think about. It's what's happening right now in response to the Sandy Hook tragedy. They will overcome it. We will overcome it. Why? Not because it's all that we can do, but because it's the right thing to do. Evil will never win so long as we rise against it, each and every time it rears its ugly head. We are doing it right now with our prayers, tears, and support for the people of Newton and particularly its children. We are defeating evil. And we will be stronger for the effort.

Republicans? They Evil.

"Republicans? They evil."

I should not be shocked to hear such commentary, especially after some twenty five years of political commentary. It's reflective of a lower class, knee jerk view of the political scene, an attitude of which liberals take full advantage.

You must understand that the speaker of that quote, I know by first hand knowledge, is not the sharpest tack in the box. He's 'a bubble off plumb' as a heating contractor I know would say. But no matter: the salient point is that the man clearly does not think things through. He wants what he wants because he wants it, and someone should just give it to him. He believes what he believes because it suits his belief system, and nothing more. This is the very definition of modern liberalism. And no fair asking questions about whether it is deserved or moral or merited. Society should simply give him what he wants because he wants it. I know this because I have spoken to him frequently. He is a student of mine, and something of a slacker.

Liberals play to this mentality, obviously enough, by promising him everything he wants. That's essentially how Barack Obama became our president-elect, though Republicans not acting Republican over the last few years surely helped. The left craves power (they are a showy, vain lot) and they get power by relying on the basest aspect of humanity: jealousy. It's not fair that other people should have what I don't. It's not fair that better paying jobs go to other folks. It's not fair that I should have to work for what I get. It's not fair that a rich woman can get an abortion and I can't, that farmers can sell their land to developers when I think that land that I'll never see should be kept pristine or that polar bears in the Alaskan wilderness should be hampered by oil rigs. If it ain't what I want, it's not fair.

And if you don't accept this train of thought?

You're evil.

Here I thought it was the Christians who had the holier than thou market cornered. You learn something new every day.

We Can't Win the War on Terror

The war on terror is so important it seems that even the President is acknowledging its importance with a troop surge in Afghanistan. This comes along with his recent admittance in Oslo that there is evil in the world, a comment unheard of from a modern Democrat. But the worst thing about this fight is the glaring fact that, when all gets said and done, we cannot win the war on terror.

The simple fact is, like evil, there will always be new forces and people willing to do things to harm other people, and impair their movement. We need only see what happened in Detroit in the last few days to understand as much. We cannot, in the long run, win something so amorphous and intangible as a war on individual human action. So, what do we do?

We fight it anyway. Just like we fight other evils. Just like humanity has had to do since the dawn of time.

The sad fact is that, as there will always be Caesars, Napoleons, and Hitlers, there too will always be little criminals, little renegades who desire nothing more than calling attention to themselves and their ultimately petty causes solely because they want to. There will always be those who think in terms of violence only, and take what pleasure they can from it in ways and forms which more civilized folks can't comprehend. That is almost entirely why we have police forces, armies and navies, and neighborhood watch programs.

It is the nature of the beast, simple as that. And that is why we must be better people and oppose it at every turn. That is why our resolve must never waver and we must always pursue and eradicate what we can. That is why we must meet their force with greater force.

We should not be surprised when new threats come from the darkest corners of the world; they rise from the dankest basements of the human mind. Where we must offer surprise, it must in shining light on evil and causing it to wither. Take away the raw hatred and replace it with the undying truth: we are better than they. We will oppose them no matter what.