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Townhall.com...
Explaining Evil,
By Cal Thomas
In the aftermath of the senseless wounding of Representative Gabrielle
Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, and the murder of six others, including
U.S. District Judge John Roll and 9-year-old Christina Green, there
will be many who will use this tragedy to advance their own political
agendas.
Explanations will be sought and blame assigned. Necessary questions
will be asked: Did the clerk at the Sportsman’s Warehouse in Tucson
violate any laws in selling the Glock 19 9mm gun to the accused,
22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner? Loughner reportedly cleared an FBI
background check. So why didn’t that check discover what one Arizona
official called Loughner’s “mental issues” and should they have
disqualified him from purchasing the weapon?
Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is being criticized because she
“targeted” some Democratic members of Congress for defeat in the
November election, superimposing crosshairs on their districts on her
SarahPAC website. Rep. Giffords was one of those “targeted.” At the
time, Giffords criticized the display saying people need to be
“responsible” for their actions. Left-wing bloggers blamed Palin for
contributing to the poisoned political atmosphere, but that explanation
is too easy.
Next week is the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s
inauguration. Less than three years later, left-wing Soviet sympathizer
Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated Kennedy. Were liberals to blame for that
horrific killing? Of course not. The assassins of Presidents William
McKinley (an unemployed anarchist) and James Garfield (a disgruntled
man rejected for a diplomatic post) lived in an era free of talk radio
and cable TV. Radio, TV and social media didn’t exist when actor John
Wilkes Booth, a confederate sympathizer, shot and killed Abraham
Lincoln. More gun laws would not have stopped Booth, or the others for
whom laws against murder were not deterrents.
The best “explanation” for this horror came from Arizona Republican
Senator John McCain. In a statement, McCain put the blame where it
belongs, on “a wicked person who has no sense of justice or
compassion.” He added, “Whoever did this; whatever their reason, they
are a disgrace to Arizona, this country and the human race, and they
deserve and will receive the contempt of all decent people and the
strongest punishment of the law.”
That is moral clarity. It places blame where it should be, on the
shooter. Many people listen to talk radio, or watch political debates
on cable TV. They don’t then pick up a gun and attempt to assassinate
public officials.
Pima County, Arizona Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, a Democrat, denounced
what he said is the nation’s vitriolic political climate: “The anger,
the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be
outrageous.” He said Arizona had become “the mecca for prejudice and
bigotry.”
Anyone familiar with political discourse in America knows it has been
rough and tumble from the beginning. Long before modern media,
newspapers condemned politicians they didn’t like, questioning their
character and moral fiber. To end vibrant, even incendiary political
rhetoric, would require the eradication of politics, itself. Other
countries have such a system. They’re called dictatorships.
Evil exists and a few are possessed by it. C.S. Lewis said that evil
isn’t an absolute; it needs good. It’s a parasite that rides on good.
G.K. Chesterton offered an explanation for evil we may not want to
hear, because it places blame where we like it least: “Men do not
differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ
enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”
We tolerate, even promote, many things we once regarded as evil, wrong,
or immoral. And then we seek “explanations” for an act that seems
beyond comprehension. Remove societal restraints on some evils and one
can expect the demons to be freed to conduct other evil acts.
The fault, as Shakespeare wrote, “lies not in our stars, but in
ourselves.” Once tolerated, evil grows like the parasite alluded to by
Lewis. It inevitably and predictably leads to other evils, like the
tragedy in Tucson.
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