How hard is it to look evil right in the eye? The news story about the 11 year old girl that was kidnapped and held as a sex slave for 19 years is rattling around in my brain. I am appalled at the enormity of this evil and my heart hurts for this poor girl and her family. Is there any chance that her life will be able to be put back together? Any kind of heinous crime that involves children always seems more horrific to me. Is it the innocence of children that makes it seem so? I can’t help but cry out: God why didn’t you do something; why didn’t you intervene? Why give evil such free reign?
Apparently this perpetrator did not seem normal but his neighbors were still shocked and stunned at the discovery. How would you feel to find that your neighbor was a kidnapper or child abuser or murderer. What kind of neighborhood psychic disturbance is created by this kind of discovery? What kind of bonds of trust are broken? What kind of fear is instilled in all our children who catch drift of this kind of news? The emotional ripples bounce around like a handful of pebbles thrown in a puddle.
I know a lot of people in this country do not view abortion as murder. But I can’t help but think that our failure to look the evil of abortion in the eye has the same kind of psychic resonance. Nearly 50 million abortions since 1973, that is about 100,000,000 people who have committed this act if you count the father and the mother. We all work with, live around people who, for whatever reason have killed their own children. And some more than once… what effect does a serial killer living in your neighbor hood have on you and on your children? How do all of the children feel who were born after Roe v. Wade became law. They are survivors of a holocaust. How come they were allowed to live? Do they wonder about their deceased brothers and sisters, cousins and friends. Can you feel the dissonance? Can you look it in the eye?
Is it any wonder that we have to put Zoloft in the public water supply to keep everybody perky enough to keep going to work so we can keep buying stuff we don’t need? It’s pretty damn depressing if you ask me.
God didn’t stop the kidnapper of that 11 year old girl just like he didn’t stop the 100,000,000 people who aborted their own children. But if I was God I would suggest you not come asking for any favors until you look that evil right in the eye and stop calling what is evil good.
"Can you feel the dissonance?"
ReplyDeleteI think I've been feeling it all my life. And I always feel it most especially when I am decidedly not looking it in the eye.
I think the feeling it and not admitting it is a cause of much emotional suffering, maybe even a root cause of mental illness. I think one of the most powerful things about art is getting us to look at those things and realizing we are not alone in feeling them. Art is an isolation buster, a de-alienationater. Walker Percy is good at making this point. I particularly remember his essay about the man on the train in "The Message in the Bottle."
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