Wednesday, December 19, 2012

COLUMNIST SAYS NEWTOWN MASSACRE NOT A TRAGEDY BUT EVIL - WHAT EVIL IS - AMERICA'S KILLING KIDS IN A DOZEN PLACES - ISRAEL'S KILLING KIDS IN GAZA


POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL BY JOHN MOSCOWITZ

Evil is an out-dated, mumbo-jumbo word.

Indeed, it explains nothing, serving only to consign something to a dark corner of extreme disapproval with zero understanding.

The author in using it makes himself slightly ridiculous.

The truth is that this terrible event is one more brutal proof of how unbalanced the human mind can be.

That most complex of organs can suffer from countless faults and errors in its construction, just as simpler organs - hearts, kidneys, and livers - so often suffer from faults in their make-up.

And just as people sometimes have parts of their bodies missing - a hand or a leg - a portion of humanity have key bits of their brains either missing or mangled.

Such an event has no more "meaning" than does a stroke of lightning or a tidal wave killing innocent people.

It is terrible, but life goes on.

But, yes, a society which actually cares for its children would have effective gun laws, knowing such things are going to happen at intervals.

But where is the concern for children in America?

What of the children slaughtered in Gaza? No chest-beating over them. Indeed, Israel gets resupplied with all the bombs and munitions expended to kill Palestinian children.

What of the thousands of Iraqi children killed and mangled by America's pointless invasion? Thousands more made refugees?

And what of the tens of thousands more murdered by a decade of horrible American sanctions against Hussein?

How many children have Americans killed in Afghanistan?

In Pakistan?

And now in Syria through the weapons and fighters imported into that country to undo its government?

The countless killed in Vietnam and Cambodia in a war to no point?

Indeed, today, the seas of Agent Orange America left behind go right on killing and crippling babies and children. What of them?

If America, that brutal imperial force, cared one whit about children, none of these questions could be raised.