Evil
By Bob Voglewede
Avera Health Vice President of Mission Services
Someone asked me the other day what I was going to write my next mission article on, and I said, “Evil.” Not surprisingly the reaction was, “Huh? Why?”
I keep asking myself the same question. I think it’s mostly because I find myself especially conscious of it of late. There seem to be so many reports of out-in-the-open evil on television and in our newspapers. It is everywhere! But I recognize I am also forcing myself to address this topic for myself, a point I will come back to. For a moment let me dwell on evil out there.
In terms of evil writ large, two especially egregious examples keep coming back to me of late. One is what has been going on for so many months in the Darfur region of Sudan: the many reports of incredible savagery directed at defenseless men, women and children, who if they aren’t shot or burned to death in their huts by marauding Janjaweed on camels, are homeless and face starvation in poorly protected refugee camps where brave aid workers try to ease their suffering. This is blatant, systemic genocide.
The other example of raw evil that stays with me is a film my wife and I watched a few weeks ago. We had heard of it but were not sure of its contents. On a Saturday evening, courtesy of Netflix, we found out. Winter Soldier is a documentary made in 1972. It consists almost entirely of young men, former members of our military, talking about the atrocities they saw and participated in when they were serving in Vietnam. Needless to say, it is painful to watch. On the one hand you see these young men who were brave in telling their story. Most likely their only reward for doing so was they would be better able to live with themselves in the years to follow. Undoubtedly, after their testimony, there were those who denied their accounts and called them traitors, but I don’t believe either was true.
On the other hand, their stories of innocents being machine-gunned, prisoners being pushed out of helicopters during interrogations, women being raped and villages needlessly destroyed brought the viewer face to face with evil. These young men looked so ordinary but what they saw and participated in was terrible.
As I think about these examples and others like them - networks of child sex slaves in certain far east countries, the relentless torture and execution of everyday people in Baghdad these weeks and months, the terrible destruction of rainforests in Brazil for so many years I’m mindful of a challenge Dean Brackley, S.J., puts before his readers in his book, The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times. He says to grow more sensitive to evil and discover it, not simply where it is out in the open, advertised by garish lights or bullet-riddled bodies, but where it “hides under a pile of virtues, wreaking havoc in the name of freedom, property rights, national security and religion.” This indeed is a more challenging task and a more threatening one. For as I begin to look for more subtle expressions of evil, I have to know that what I will find “out there” may be just as true “in here.”
But this is where my reflections are slowing down. I commented that part of my taking up this topic was to challenge myself, and my meaning is this. Examples of evil writ large I can see; I have stated as much. And the evil or seeds of evil in myself I have some sense of. I’m aware of some of my un-Christ-like thoughts and actions in my present circumstances, and I fear to think of how I might respond if I lived in a less organized part of the world, if I worked in a less com-passionate business environment, or if drugs, easy sex, and opportunities to abuse the weak were just outside my neighborhood door.
But it’s the middle area with which I am struggling: developing a sensitivity for evil disguised, as Brackley says, as good. Presently, I find myself thinking about common expressions and wondering if they point to what he says about evil hiding under a pile of virtues. Comments like, “It’s too bad, but that’s just the way things work,” or “Dangerous times call for otherwise disturbing responses,” or, “These are just good people trying to earn a living and put food on their table.”
In addition, I find myself thinking, “What about a culture where it would be suicide for a politician to suggest a tax increase to better the lives of the poor, where we ‘help’ the mentally ill by putting them out on the street to find their way or incarcerate them in hellish jails to rage away their lives, where the honorable vocation of politician seems reduced to spin, deception and deciding legislation according to campaign contributions?”
What about our system of tariffs that impact peasant farmers in Latin America, our treatment of suspected terrorist prisoners in foreign prisons, or a system of ownership and distribution whereby drugs that can save lives are never an option for people in third world countries? What about our tax breaks for the most well-to-do, the continuous defeat of a higher minimum wage bill or the trafficking in arms sales that goes on in our country and elsewhere?
I am sure you can add examples of your own and may disagree with some of what I question. My point is that for me this is the challenge in terms of evil, to discover it under the guise of what is good, what is reasonable, what is “just what we have to do in the real world.”