Evil Has a Field-Day in Connecticut !

No doubt you are aware of the horror that occurred yesterday (Friday) and what has unfolded in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. ''Evil visited this community today,'' Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy said that evening. ''We are all in this together.''  No truer words have been spoken, but when you think about it, says Erick Erickson, editor of RedState News, ''we don't, as a nation, come together much any more except in tragedy.

"We used to come together as a nation during the Olympics, when we rooted for Americans. But in recent years we are too often lectured about jingoism in rooting for our side. We used to come together as we sent men and women into space, but we can't much afford to do that any more and we don't. When we come together for most sporting events, we find ourselves, at times angrily, divided among friends among teams.''

Erickson makes the strong point that people come together as a nation every four years to inaugurate the President. But it has turned into a bitter and divisive exercise since Obama and his cronies hijacked the electorate by splitting the demographics to include rich against poor, black/brown against white, gays against straights, atheists against Christians and young against the old. He adds, ''About the only time we ever come together as a nation anymore is when savage tragedy happens. When men fly planes into tall buildings, shoot up a movie theater or gun down children, we gather, pray and cry. It is not healthy for a nation that its only acts of coming together are acts of tragedy, or even charity stemming from tragedy.''

The gunman, identified as Adam Lanza, 20, was found dead at the scene of the slaughter. Besides the 20 children and 6 adults, police believe Lanza is also responsible for the death of an unidentified woman at a home in Newtown (later found to be his mother). His brother Ryan is cooperating with the investigation. Ryan told police that Adam has a history of mental illness, according to a senior police official. The tragedy unfolding today is not an act of the insane, but an act of evil. That evil may drive the shooter insane, but in focusing on the insanity we lose focus on the evil....real, palpable evil. And there will be a vocal group of secularists or pathetic atheists that would chime in and dispute this observation.

The conversation at times of evil is immediately drowned out by political opportunists seeking to drive their agenda. The news channels meditate on the nature of gun violence and gun restrictions or what other restrictions or laws can ever be used. We do that, in part, because in times of grief and helplessness it makes us feel like we can do something. But we can do nothing in the face of evil until we confront evil itself. There is really good and there is really real evil in the world and philosophers from Nietzsche, Spinoza, Jung and even Ayn Rand have recognized it for what is. Rand brings it into sharper perspective: Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of his evil is that nameless act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's moral consciousness, the refusal to think -- not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing one's mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgement -- on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if you refuse to identify it. This is the milieu of Evil.

The Way I See It....in this small window of grief-stricken opportunity, America has a real moment to assess why it is that it is careening out of control morally and socially. In that small window, instead of discussing the politics or the laws, they should discuss the evil and the good and the God, on which the U.S. was founded, from whom they have, as a nation, drifted so far.

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee says, ''We have systematically removed God from our schools. The anti-religious movement with their twisting of the founder's intentions for a separation of church and state have forced restrictions on school prayer and religious materials in the classroom. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?  What he says next is so true: ''We've made school a place where we don't want to talk about eternity, karma, the sanctity of life, what responsibility means, accountability -- that we're not just going to have to be accountable to the police if they catch you, but your fellow citizens and a higher power. If you don't believe that....then you don't fear that.'' 

I'm afraid the things that Mike Huckabee mentions are also rarely spoken and taught at home. I have found that the basics of morality doesn't spring from a TV set, a Nintendo game or the Internet but from the actions and discussions of the parents to a child's experiences.  The instilling of civic responsibility and social accountablity produces good citizens. Of course this can and should be re-enforced along with a good dose of caring discipline when the need arises..