This first paragraph is a repost of a Facebook status update from yesterday as reports came in of Congress rushing through “repeal ACA” votes under the cover of darkness. What follows is a comment I added almost immediately to elaborate on EVIL.
Is there any more doubt in anyone’s mind that this Congress prefers darkness? They work their evil while we sleep. Literally. Liars. This is what evil means, folks.
Right wingers (and even some Progressives) laugh and scoff when I use terms like “evil”. It’s a media…/Hollywood induced neutering of the idea of evil at work here. To think that evil is some “white hat/black hat” thing, with “the devil” as this mythical creature with horns and giving “assignments” to his minions of demons, is to be susceptible to the real workings of evil.
EVIL is a theological concept that is intended for us humans to consider. And consider this: Evil is carried out by the workings of not only individuals, but on a much larger and more insidious scale by organizations and nations and other social groups. It is this power of “the wheel” that drives corporations and even many forms of religion. It is the “distance” that large groups and processes create between the various individual parts, so that “consequences” and results are hidden from the participant parts.
These “systems” are created that appear to be providing us with our requisite goods, but destroying lives and communities elsewhere. And politics operate much like systems do. Indeed, they ARE a type of system, that support pieces of the larger system. Ideologies in a political system educate and propogandize and create a narrative which adherents must recite.
And the realities of these narratives distance from the “truth of the matter” will work to perpetuate EVIL. Evil works under darkness. Darkness of ideologies. Darkness of “biblical” interpretations. Darkness covering real consequences with narratives that collude to hide the injustices being carried out elsewhere, and also around us “at a distance”. A “distance” created by our social circles and chosen neighborhoods.
The 1% is not just some left wing political ideology. It identifies an operative EVIL, in which even the most compassionate and progressive members still participate, “buffered” form the consequences of the machine that keeps them safe on their side of the wall, but creates “sacrifice zones” of communities outside the “Green Zone”. There is much in this realization that condemns me. This is why I need the community of the redeemed to hold me to account, and keep telling me the OTHER story; that story OTHER than the narratives built by decades and centuries of “success”. We have some “Good News” which is BAD NEWS for these narratives that have driven humanity to drive the
