In
the twenty-first century, evil hath no face. The general prejudice of
Americans— particularly white Americans— causes us to picture
brown skinned, turban wearing individuals who believe in Allah
(simply Arabic for Yahweh, which is Hebrew for God).
Prejudice
aside, we have absolutely no idea who is guilty of the terror at the
Boston Marathon. Earlier today, I saw a picture of the child who was
killed on Boylston Street and I found myself haunted not by the death
of a child holding a sign that says "No more hurting people;
peace", but by the apathy toward this tragedy and my own
struggle with a severe disconnect to the violence. For the sake of
brevity, in the case this act of terror is found to come from an
individual who is domestic, American born, and perhaps even white,
what I propose is that we as Americans are to blame for we have
become entirely unmoved by violence and the horror violence creates.
It
will be easy to condemn a foreign entity with foreign agents of
terror, but what are we going to say if it happens to be an American?
Furthermore, what are we going to say when we are forced to ask
ourselves how different this is from the Colorado Shooting or other
atrocities especially if those involved do not suffer from mental
health issues, but from indoctrination?
A
second set of questions: "who do we blame?" and "who
do we kill?" The killing cannot stop at Boylston Street if we
seek justice as we understand it in the law books But in a
spiritual sense, are we willing to send these individuals to their
virgins? Or, if that was not the case, how many should be sent to
their deaths to obtain justice for those who have been murdered? The
pursuit of justice, in this case, should be inflection and change in
our hearts, to stop violence when we see it, and to put a stop to the
ever increasing sociopathic tendencies toward violence. We should
confront ourselves with these things in the attempt to dissolve them
completely.
President
Obama referred to this attack as a tragedy and he has been hounded by
news syndicates to condemn it further, to upgrade it from "tragedy"
to something else— an "act of terror" or some such over
used, over glorified phrase. That is the problem. We are already so
disconnected from the tragedy, we seek to call it something else and
to defend it to the end simply because we are becoming less and less
able to empathize with the victims. This is a
tragedy and people need to get upset over it and grieve for humanity
as a whole rather than letting it fuel their prejudices and serve as
entertainment to their boredom.
In
the twenty-first century, evil begets apathy, thus evil reigns with a
swift dominance of the globe. It coasts effortlessly like a feather
in a vacuum gives way to Earth's gravity. The compassion we once had
as a species, though still present in certain circumstances, was once
a friction to violence and the evil born from it.
~
Joe
