WHERE IS EVIL LOCATED?

As I write this, one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing is dead, a police officer dead and another critically wounded, and the other suspect is the subject of—as it is chillingly put “a massive manhunt”.  I hope that it ends soon.  I want to hope that he can be “taken” alive, so we that maybe we will find out why this happened, if there are others involved or more attacks planned, but given what seems to have happened overnight, I doubt it.

I put quotations around those two, because I want to talk about how we talk about evil.  I want to see those responsible for this crime caught. I want to see structures and policies in place that help prevent these. But I also want us to think about how we think about and talk about evil, and how that can actually contribute to evil.

One of the commentators on TV this morning said something like (it’s not a direct quote): “what’s particularly chilling is that those who are alleged to have done this horrendous evil seemed to be just like any average American youth.”  The implication being that your average American youth couldn’t do violence like what was done.  I hear young people who knew the brother still at large talk about how he was just a regular guy, laid back, good student, good wrestler, liked to talk about which rapper was better, how the Red Sox did.  In other words, one said, “just like everybody else.” 

What’s behind us is that, I believe is the belief that evil is done by someone else—that it is outside us.  That people who do evil are evil people, and if you’re a good person, you can’t do evil.  Evil people, in our collective mind, must look different, act different, talk different (watch how the right-wing talk folks use this to attack immigration reform).  Evil people are to be “hunted down”, “taken”, “terminated” and so on.

I’m not against prosecuting people who do evil, or trying to stop them.  But when we locate evil outside ourselves, we almost always end up causing evil ourselves.  Because it’s too easy to break the world into evil people who do evil, and good (innocent, law abiding—pick your judgment) who do good.  If we believe that, then what we do to stop or counteract evil must, by definition, be good.  Which, history has shown us is not true at all.

We have been pretty expert at locating evil outside ourselves: Reagan’s “The Evil Empire”, Bush’s “The Axis of Evil”.  No doubt, there was enormous evil done by the Ayatollahs in Iran, Hussein, the Soviets, the north Koreans.  But our response has multiplied that evil, while baptizing it as good.

Democracy Now (http://www.democracynow.org) had a section today on the genocide trial of former dictator Efrain Rios Montt in Guatemala.  Rios Montt was backed by the US during his reign, where tens of thousands of civilians were murdered by the army (including some trained at our School of the Americas).  We funded and supported his reign of terror, because ideologically he “was on our side” during the Cold War against the Soviets. The genocide trial was stopped by the Guatemalan Supreme Court recently, because evidence points to the involvement of the current President, General Otto Pérez Molina, in the genocide.

The victims tortured and killed by the regime included teachers, church and labor leaders, many peasants, most of them indigenous, entire families with children, entire villages.  Rios Montt was not just supported by our government, but because he was a “born-again Christian”, by many prominent right-wing Christian leaders in the US.

They played a clip from an interview from recently after the genocide in which the journalist, Allan Nairn, was being interviewed on Charlie Rose, along with Eliot Abrams, the Undersecretary of State in the Reagan Administration at the time of the genocide, who was closely involved in funding and directing all the military regimes in Central America.  When    pushed for investigations and war crime trials for those involved—both in Guatemala, and their patrons here—Abrams essentially responded that “we” won the Cold War by what we did, and if “you” are asking these questions, “you” must have wanted “the other side” to win.  We = good, you = evil. 

This good/evil has all sorts of implications.  As long as we locate evil outside ourselves, we will always prosecute those who we see as evil, and never get to root causes.  Criminals—need to be locked up (while causes of crime ignored).  Criminals with guns need to be locked up (while our love of guns as a nation is elevated to a “right”).  Leaders of “terrorist groups” like Hamas need to be assassinated, and their family and homeland destroyed, while Israel—who has killed far more civilians than Hamas—needs to be rewarded with more military aid from the US.  And in a less violent sphere, our politics has degenerated to such a point that we can’t sit down and listen to opposing views, and compromise is seen as a sellout.

Thomas Merton, the great poet and Trappist monk has an essay somewhere (It might be in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander) where he talks about how we as a society have created a worldview that evil is outside us, and how that worldview perpetuates evil.  I will try to hunt that essay down.  In the meantime, maybe these words of Jesus from the gospel of Luke might help (Luke 6:41-42):

“Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.”

As we seek justice in the Boston Marathon bombings, let us also look for injustice inside us.  And together, with our “enemies”, seek to understand.

Be justice. Be beauty (even when the world seems so ugly).

Patrick